Trip Planning at Home: 2 Programs Compared

DeLorme Mapping and the American Automobile Assn., two of the best-known names in maps, recently released competing Windows CD-ROM travel mapping programs. At about $50 each, neither the “AAA Trip Planner” nor DeLorme’s “Map’n’Go” is as cheap or as useful as a AAA membership and visiting the auto club office for free maps, books and tour guides.

“Map’n’Go,” which includes a 128-page, 11-by-16-inch paperbound atlas of North America, is very impressive nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the “AAA Trip Planner,” a collaboration of AAA, Compton’s New Media and GeoSystems Global Corp. (a division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.), is badly flawed.

For starters, you cannot plan an itinerary with it by viewing a map and pointing at places along the way that you want to visit. Without being able to see a map on the screen, you must type in the names of the cities that define the route you want to take.

There is a pop-up list of city names to help, but you may need to study a paper map first to figure out the route. Neither an atlas nor an instruction manual comes with the “AAA Trip Planner.” An on-screen map can be viewed when you aren’t defining a route, but it has only three levels of detail: North America, individual states and major cities. Unless you travel only on interstate highways, none of the maps has enough detail to make it worth printing. The program can also produce a printed list of the itinerary, describing the roads and highways to drive, the distances between each city and across each state, as well as the cumulative distance and the driving time.

Even that is of questionable use. It routed me along 17 miles of surface streets to get out of Los Angeles when a freeway was only two miles from my starting point. And you cannot tailor the average speed calculations to suit your driving style.

One vaunted strength of the “AAA Trip Planner”: It has hotel, motel and restaurant listings from all the auto club TourBooks, although a year old. You can narrow your search criteria among five price categories and five quality ratings.

But once your choices are shown on the screen, you cannot print a list of them. Instead, you must highlight each facility on the screen, one at a time, and print out a single page description. The printed report would be nice for the visually impaired. Everyone else will wonder why the program uses such large type to put so little information on a page.

What about tourist attractions? There’s an impressive listing, from amusement parks to zoos.

I decided to check out the attractions of St. George, Utah, found Zion National Park and clicked on the name to see the details. They read: “No further information available.”

Higher on the list were names of places such as Angels Landing Trail and Great White Throne, but there’s no indication that they are in Zion National Park unless you click on each name and read the pop-up description. Alphabetically they came before Zion, so I guess in someone’s simple mind it was assumed that you would have already found out all you needed to know by the time you clicked on Zion National Park.

It is DeLorme’s “Map’n’Go,” not the “AAA Trip Planner,” that produces custom trip maps resembling the Triptik strips that most AAA offices assemble to help auto club members plan their routes.

You can plan a trip in “Map’n’Go” by pointing at locations on the map anywhere in North America, with 13 levels of magnification available to take you from a continental view to major city street detail.

I planned a 1,400-mile trip by identifying the beginning and ending points, and “Map’n’Go” picked the proper route, including the most efficient freeway route through Los Angeles.

At towns and cities along any route, you can find lists of hotels, restaurants, campgrounds (which “AAA Trip Planner” doesn’t have) and attractions. A quick scroll through the list of accommodations shows prices and symbols for various amenities. Those of interest can be attached to the travel plan being created, though only their names, addresses and telephone numbers will be printed.

The printed Travel Plan is a handsome set of strip maps with high-quality typography, varying line widths and styles to indicate road and highway types, and even lakes, rivers, elevations and points of interest. Each page covers about 75 miles and is keyed to the appropriate page in the atlas.

Along the margins are cumulative mileage figures at each major highway intersection and cumulative elapsed times. (You can change the speed for different types of roads.) The accommodations you have selected are also identified.

Like an AAA-assembled Triptik, the “Map’n’Go” Travel Plan maps are aligned so you start at the bottom and drive toward the top of the map. A large arrow indicates north on each page.

Because of the detailed graphics content, printing can take a long time. But the results are worth it, particularly with a color ink-jet printer.

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