My throat clenched. My heart sank. For a moment, my mind went blank. Then I sent a tribute off to [email protected]. I am sure there will be gazillions of tributes sent, and mine will be lost in the global outpouring of sadness and loss, but I cannot let this moment go without saying my piece.

My inspiration for the column came from a conversation at a pub the other night. My iPad2 was on the table next to my ice cold beer. The guys I was with kept staring at it. Tip for girls: Do not bring the iPad along on dates. They are more interested in your device than you.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” one said.

“You know you can tell so much about someone’s character from looking at their iPad,” the other chipped in.

So there you have it, your life is now an open iPad.

Then their eyes opened in horror. “Have you got a crack on it?” “I see two cracks.” “Oh my God.”

Yes, my barely-three-month-old iPad2 has got a couple of cracks on it and when people notice it, you’d think I’d committed some horrible crime. I swear I could have 10 zits on my face and they wouldn’t notice that – but they’d notice the cracks on the iPad.

Anyway, it got me to thinking how important the iPad has become in everyone’s lives. And I am probably Apple’s biggest evangelist, along with several million others.

I recently convinced an 80-something-year-old friend living in the UK to get an iPad so that we could communicate more but the hook for her was the fact that she could download recipes from the Internet so that she could be inspired to cook even better than she already does. This is someone who doesn’t even use a mobile phone and is now writing me emails.

Then I told this story to a 60-something-year-old friend of mine in Thailand who uses her mobile phone only to talk, nothing else. Well, the next time I saw her, she told me she’d got the iPad and that her son was teaching her to use it. She loves gardens and now she can be inspired by the world wide web of gardens.

At a travel conference recently, I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the boss of a major travel agency who said they had given an iPad to every consultant so they could work better with their clients – not only to inspire them but also to do functional stuff like plan their bookings.

In many travel agencies across Asia, there are owners who still haven’t given their staff laptops and their own broadband connection and here’s this one who’s leapfrogged into the current.

I truly believe the iPad’s been the best thing to happen to travel in a long long time. It is inspiration in your hand. Its rich user experience lends itself beautifully to travel content. Images come alive. Videos give movement to travel. They make you want to move off that couch.

It takes you from one world to another with just a glide of your fingers, and it makes you simply want to glide like a 747.

So on this day, October 6, the day the creator of the iPad left us, I call on all travel agency owners to give an iPad to each of their frontlife staff – if we are to inspire the world to travel, we need to arm our frontliners of inspiration with the coolest thing to happen to travel.

On behalf of all of us in Planet Travel, thank you, Steve Jobs and we wish you peace on this greatest journey of all.