Interactive e-book lends advice to women who travel

If there were a Girl Scout badge for travel, you’d surely earn it after using these tips.

Name: “101 Tips for Women Travelers E-book,” www.oattravel.com/101tips

Available: Interactive flipbook; .pdf for laptop or personal computers; .epub for iPad (with iBooks), Sony Reader and all other non-Kindle e-book readers; .mobi for Amazon Kindle devices.

What it does: This free, downloadable e-book by Overseas Adventure Travel, a company geared toward travelers 50 and older, is chockablock with practical tips to help you become a smarter, better-prepared traveler. The e-book is written for women by experienced female travelers, but any traveler, no matter the gender or age, will be savvier for reading it.

What’s hot: Many of the tips were new to me. Michelle from Boston said, “Check out photos of your destination before you go. Researching your destination in advance of your trip helps you plan what photos you want to take.” Also, “Leave your money belt out until you get past security. New scanning machines at airport security can pick up on a money belt as something hidden beneath your clothing, resulting in your being pulled out for a pat-down and additional questioning,” advises Becki from Tennessee. Don’t miss the quotes and stories from and about notable women travelers throughout history. I especially appreciated the appendix with handy digital resources, clothing sizes around the world, an essential foreign phrase guide and the Bandanarama section: 25 uses for a scarf.

What’s not: I tested both the interactive flipbook and the epub on my IPad 3, and the flipbook was a smoother experience. A case in point: On the flipbook, I could look at the table of contents and touch the chapter I wanted to view, and it would jump to that page. In the epub on iBooks, I had to scroll through the pages to skip to, say, Chapter 9.

travel@latimes.com