10 tips to travel like a boss, Internet-style

In days of yore, traveling required hardiness and preparation. No cell phones with which to summon roadside repairs, reliance on regionally targeted paper maps, and the scourge of retail hotel/meal prices.

Thanks to communications technology enabled by the military-industrial complex, here are a few tips that can reduce the cost and stress of traveling.

Preparing

1. Kayak.com has a brilliant tool that provides a birds-eye view of the cheapest travel times and destinations. Surf to Kayak's Explore, specify your point of origin, and see a map showing the lowest price for each world destination within the cost threshold you choose.

2. Once you've picked a destination, look at flight, hotel room, and car rental packages through online booking services like Orbitz (packages seem significantly cheaper than purchasing separately).

3. Compare different online booking services and dates to find the cheapest.

4. Once you're narrowed things down, use YouTube to see what hotel rooms actually look like, rather than what the hotels want you to think the rooms look like (via the magic of the fisheye lens and "Facebook Angles").

5. If your destination is an urban center, sign up to Groupon, and its many clones, well before your trip using your destination city instead of your home city. Cut your costs by acquiring coupons to restaurants, services, and attractions.

Communicating and Navigating

6. If your phone is unlocked, buy a SIM card for a local number. If your phone isn't unlocked, consider renting a smartphone.

7. While it's common for North American three star hotels to offer a free Internet connection, many four and five star hotels don't. Smartphone "tethering" can eliminate the need to pay hotel Internet fees. When you get a SIM card, get one with a generous data plan (as tethering consumes data much quicker than normal smartphone use).

8. Use GPS turn-by-turn navigation to eliminate the need to buy local maps. Many car rental companies include GPS navigation as an add-on. If you have an Android phone, Google Navigation is free and highly effective. Be aware, however, that Google's data is not always 100 percent reliable.

9. If tethering, some companies, like T-Mobile, have web filtering that blocks controversial sites and requires a U.S. social insurance number (as proof of age) to disable, using an online form. When tethering, the use of SSH tunneling is a slightly tricky, yet effective, way to circumvent the filtering.

10. If you wish to remove filtering on the smartphone itself, SSH tuneling won't cut it. For that, identity "borrowing" is required, but doing so may be illegal and imperil kittens.