I recall as a schoolgirl in Penang, hiding under my bedcovers, and tuning into the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) radio station. It was the only station playing decent music and I’d send in requests, and I’d wait for them to be answered. What a thrill.

Yesterday, I was on radio in Singapore – Living Room 93.8 – a talk show station and the subject was how social media was changing the way people, in particular, Singaporeans planned and booked their travel. With me were Marc Charron, the man charged with expanding TripAdvisor’s empire in Asia Pacific, and Mario Jobbe, the co-founder of Circos Brand Karma. 

It was fun. Hosts Pamela Ho and Stanley Leong are bubbly deejays and wanted to know, among other things, what Singaporeans wrote about most in reviews. Food, said Mario. No surprise. The only time I get comments on my Facebook updates is when I post pictures of food in places I travel to.

Mario believes that social networks and the way it was allowing people to share hotel reviews in particular were enabling travellers to make better decisions about places to stay and to know what to expect. Actually, in some ways, it raises expectations, he said, because now that someone had read about it, they had a certain expectation.

To be contrary, I said that travel reviews were actually taking the mystery out of travel – by the time you get to a hotel, you know what the room looks like, even the toilet. Takes the romance and surprise out of travel, I said.

“You want to be surprised?” challenged Marc, who said that travel reviews were actually giving people confidence to travel to somewhere they may not have thought of but now felt more comfortable about because they had read about it.

Whatever you believe, the fact is there is a whole lot more information out there about anything and anywhere on the Internet and you have to wonder how the early explorers did it without guidebooks or GPS devices.

In fact, today, I was having coffee with a friend who has just returned from a road trip of America and he said the best quote came from his brother, who was travelling with him, “Imagine we used to do this without GPS?”

It is thus appropriate that today, the travel insiders website I started in 2005, The Transit Café, went live as part of the Web In Travel platform. The Transit Café was something my former colleagues and I dreamt up after we left TravelWeekly and we wanted an excuse to still do something together and we wanted it to offer an alternative take on travel.

Over the years, a handful of us have kept it percolating while the others have gone on to pursue other ventures – hey, everyone needs to make an honest living – but this year, with the revamp of Web In Travel, I saw an opportunity to bring the two worlds together, to blend the new and the old, as it were.

See, even as I confess to being a gadget hound – I am constantly surprised and delighted by what technology can do – I am more in love with the idea of what it can do for us.

For example, today I downloaded FryPaper on my iPad – Stephen Fry’s own newspaper – and I can now get my daily dose of Fry stories. In the old days, no one, not even a celebrity like Fry, would be able to start up his own newspaper and write what the hell he likes and give it away for free.

I am also toying with Wikihood, which detects where you are and then sends you information about where you are at. Just in case you get lost, I guess, and if you don’t happen to have a GPS.

You could argue that all these gadgets and all that information could make us risk-averse as people, let alone travellers. Before we meet someone new, let’s find out everything we can. Or before we go somewhere new, read up all we can and plan our trip every step of the way.

Or you could turn it around and use the tools and information to prise open new doors, doors you might otherwise not have opened. It could enrich conversations and travel experiences.

Indeed, technology should inspire us to travel more and further, and enable us to do that with ease and fun.

Just like radio did to my imagination in those early years and continues to do.

Featured image credit (Retro Radio): Ockra/iStock