Insider Trading on the Net

“Planning ‘Enchanted April’ trip to Italy. Looking for villa in movie, and suggested activity during the day. Maybe cooking demo with local chef?”

Linda Adams posted that request last month on an electronic bulletin board called rec.travel.europe. It’s one of more than 11,000 special-interest discussion groups on the Internet, a worldwide computer network that reaches an estimated 25 million people. Less than 24 hours after making her plea, the Costa Mesa-based marketing executive hit cyberspace pay dirt.

A fellow traveler from San Francisco saw it and sent Adams, via electronic mail, the name and phone number of a Northern California woman who specializes in Italian villa rentals and sets up wine and cooking tours and visits with local chefs. Adams, in turn, passed the California contact along to a Long Island, N.Y., woman looking for cooking tours in Florence. “Can you imagine how many phone calls it would have taken to find a resource so specific?” Adams marvels. “This is ‘inside travel information’ at its finest.”

Whether your fantasies run to a wisteria-swathed Italian villa or the best buffet in Las Vegas, chances are good you’ll find someone on one of the Internet’s travel-related Usenet newsgroups who’s been there.

Like their discussion group counterparts on commercial on-line services such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy, Internet newsgroups allow travelers to exchange opinions and advice with like-minded people. But while the commercial services reach a few million people, at most, a posting on an Internet newsgroup casts a far wider--and more international--net.

The newsgroups, which can be accessed through all three major commercial services, range in popularity from a handful of messages a month to several hundred a day. Travel-related subjects have mushroomed: Less than a year ago, says Allen Noren of the Travelers’ Resource Center in Sebastopol, Calif., rec.travel was the only group available. Now, rec.travel has disbanded, replaced by more narrowly focused groups such as rec.travel.air, rec.travel.marketplace, rec.travel.cruises and rec.travel.asia.

The veracity and quality of information exchanged varies widely. Advice ranges from insipid to insightful (in rec.travel.europe, a recent series of messages, called “threads,” discussed how to avoid looking and sounding like an Ugly American). And sifting through the postings in search of a specific destination or topic can be tedious and time-consuming.

“If you know what you’re after, (a newsgroup) can be an effective tool,” Noren says. “But there’s a lot more useless chatter and posturing than there used to be.”

But for new Internet users such as Adams, the sense of community and serendipitous discovery remains intact.

Not long after her “Enchanted April” experience, Adams replied to someone who wanted tips on getting tickets to Wimbledon and the French Open. She told of simply showing up at the French Open and bargaining for great seats at acceptable prices, and gave some inside tips on when to go.

Small bytes: For a solid overview of travel-planning resources available through the Internet and commercial on-line services, pick up the April issue of Online Access magazine ($4.95). A well-researched story steers readers to sites from Antarctica to Disney World, while “Editors’ Choice” lists more than 50 resources for 25 top tourism spots in the United States and Canada.

Southwest Airlines launched its own page on the World Wide Web (a user-friendly system for displaying and linking information on the Internet) last month, with easy-access schedules and fares for all its destinations. The airline hopes to offer direct electronic bookings later this year. Southwest’s Web address: https:// www.iflyswa.com.

Electronic Explorer appears the second Sunday of the month and welcomes comments from readers; her e-mail address is Laura.Bly@news.latimes.com.