The title may sound like an oxymoron, I mean, how happy can you be when travelling, if you don’t own your own personal jet or eye-candy stewards to serve you freshly squeezed juice, and centre filled chocolates with a gentle shoulder rub thrown in for good measure?

But funnily and also thankfully enough, airports have realised that an unhappy traveller comes a close second, to a plane full of screaming babies, hence the recent shift towards travel friendly airports.

Since I am currently based in Singapore I shall talk about the airport that I am most familiar with. Changi Airport offers free wifi at all four of their terminals. Now travellers can surf the net, log on to their office network, if they are suddenly overcome with love for their jobs, or more realistically, check their personal email, update their blogs, Facebook account and register and update their ArrivedOK account. With over 400 free internet kiosks and 80 laptop Ethernet access points located throughout the terminal lounges and transit areas, Changi Airport offers everyone in the vicinity wireless broadband, keeping us happy and connected.

This shift towards being contact-able on the go is great news. There used to be a time when I would have to lug a whole bag of coins to call home while waiting the requisite three hours before boarding. On days that I forgot my bag of change, I used to stare at the worn out linoleum on the floor until my eyes crossed and vision blurred. Thankfully now there are much more constructive things for travellers to do with their time. Of course the luxury of free wifi and air-conditioning is still a foreign concept in some countries, so if you have any horror or happy airport experiences to share, please do, because I would love to have a list of airports I should avoid or at least come armed with an arsenal of entertainment, so as not to go crazy with boredom.

As the saying goes about too much of a good thing…., Its now come to a point, that airports have become such wonderful places to be at, that non travellers seem to prefer to while away their free-time napping or reading magazines while sipping coffee, making it no longer a place no longer exclusive to those of us toting boarding passes.

If this trend continues, one day genuine travellers will no longer have anywhere to hangout at during the three excruciatingly long hours until boarding, what with all the seats taken up by the non travelling riff-raff surfing the net on the mobile phones while sipping their cup of expresso!

We keep on receiving responses about ArrivedOK. Here are some of them. Thanks to everyone who took a look at the service, your feedback is very inspiring!

“Simple, clear, and straightforward,.. convenient service” – KillerStartups.com

“This is a brilliant concept! Bravo!” – Dr. Jessie Voigts from Wanderingeducators.com

“I am definitely going to use this next time we fly somewhere!” – Sandy Nielsen, Sleeps5.com

“I can see a pretty nice potential to something like this. I will be traveling in a few months throughout the states as well as Europe, and could really use something like this.” – Nick via blackberrycool.com

“Thank you thank  you thank you. You are one of the few sites that care about all people not just the ones with out disabilities. I commend you guys for that and might feature you on a podcast I do for this purpose. Check it out at feeds2.feedburner.com/funfilled – Sarah Alawami.

“Very cool!” – @Hdueitt, New York, NY.

“Neat!” – Emmanuel Marot, Seattle, WA

“Brilliant.” – Travelbuzz NY

“What a nice idea!” – Joe Distefano, Melbourne.

“Excellent traveler’s essential” – Frans-Jozef, Manchester, UK.

“Do you have a mother like mine? Neurotic? She always wants to know when my plane has landed.” – Suzanne Dowling, San Francisco, CA.

“Ah hah. Another neat idea that came flying into my inbox this afternoon… It’s called ArrivedOK. Peace of mind. Especially for mum.” – Mobile Industry Review.

“If you’ve ever flown, you know what’s like to call and tell everyone you made it.” – @JasonClough, Raleigh, NC.

“Seems like ArrivedOK idea is pretty neat.” – @feebeyer, Berlin.

“ArrivedOK is a great idea.” – @jaketay, Australia.

“Wow. arrivedok.mobi is ridiculously clever little thing for anyone who travels. Sends predefined texts when you switch your phone back on.” – @Ana Nelson, Dublin, Ireland.

“Definitely cool use of technology.” by Craig Agranoff from Scommerce.com

“I #arrivedOK to London. Beta testing ArrivedOK. If you see this then I just arrived at London LHR and it works!..” – Jonathan Clark, Amsterdam.

“When it seemed that everything was invented!..” – @nicolasariza, Medellín – Here comes ArrivedOK [A.D].

“ArrivedOK: now there’s a piece of clever telecoms technology. Sometimes there arrives a perfect solution to a real problem.” – Pat Phelan, Ireland.

Andy Abramson, Del Mar, CA: “A very imaginative service… As a global nomad this kind of service is ideal for me, especially with my family and colleagues. I regularly text the word “landed” when I touch down using either SMS or the built in Blackberry Messenger to those on my Messenger Buddy List internally… I imagine the service will be very useful to the frequent flier types who have to be working anywhere at any time. From my perspective, ArrivedOk will cut down on a task that for some can be time consuming or just challenging. They smartly have also included email as a notification mechanism.”

“You’re really a bit surprised nobody thought of this before.” – David Sims, TMCnet, at his article about ArrivedOK.

“See, this way, your personal arrival is noted instead of flight status in general, so when you oversleep your nine-hour Dubai layover, or miss your connecting flight in Heathrow, you don’t have anybody tapping their toes at the airport for hours while you’re still over the Atlantic Ocean. Not that that’s happened to this reporter either, no siree. No personal experience there, spending two hours traveling out to the Istanbul Airport, waiting three hours and returning home empty-handed only to have to go back later that night.”

“If you’re tired of picking up the phone and calling half a dozen people every time you land in a new city to let them know you arrived OK, you might want to check out a new service called… ArrivedOK.” – Downloadsquad.com

“As passengers, once we’ve safely arrived at our destination, we power up our Blackberries and iPhones to let our loved ones know that the flight is over… Whether we make a call, send a text, update our Facebook status or “tweet” it on Twitter, we feel compelled to let our friends and family know we arrived OK… But the next time I fly, I won’t be calling my mom, boyfriend or roommate to let them know I’m safely sitting on the tarmac waiting to access the overhead compartment. Because next time I’m going to use ArrivedOK.”- Vacationplanning.net: Flight Tracker Cleared for Takeoff.

“ArrivedOK is a clever service that texts loved ones when you land at your destination and turn on your phone. It would be quite useful as an everyday shorter-journey service too. My mother-in-law-to-be always forgets to text us when she arrives home in Carlow from Waterford.” – Paul M. Watson, Waterford, Ireland.

“Touch down in another country, and it’s likely the first thing you’ll want to do is let friends and famly know you’ve reached your destination safe and sound. But dialing direct means those dastardly international roaming rates kick in… This kind of traveler dilemma is what makes us especially intrigued by ArrivedOK… Along with the convenience of being able to alert multiple people at once, the app means you’re bypassing the hefty international charges you’d incur for voice, text and email services via your cell phone while traveling abroad.” – lorraine @ travelpost.com: Skip International Roaming Rates with ArrivedOK Phone App.

“Interesting new service called ArrivedOK. It works in a unique way…” – Ronen Halevy via berryreview.com

See the press release in Russian.

See the press release in Japanese. ◎乗客の到着を自動通知　「アライブドオーケイ」

London, 20 April
Distributed by PR Newswire on behalf of arrivedok.mobi

WWW.ARRIVEDOK.MOBI flight tracker and arrival messenger selected as an Official Honoree in The 13th Annual Webby Awards, gets localized for Japanese and Russian markets, available for the rest of the world now.

Austin, TX – 20 April 2009 — ArrivedOK, the personal flight arrival tracker and arrival messenger is now available in Japanese and Russian languages and open for beta testing in most countries of the world. The service lets air passengers automatically notify others about their arrival to airports worldwide by email, SMS, via blogs or Twitter, and enables travelers to save on international roaming charges.

Developed by Eyeline Communications Inc., ArrivedOK lets travelers enter flight information and recipient emails or phone numbers before take-off. When you reach your destination and turn on your cell phone, the service locates your cell phone in the local mobile network and automatically sends out a brief arrival message to the recipients in your list.

Along with the convenience of being able to alert at once different people with different messages, the application allows users bypassing the heavy international roaming charges for voice, text and mobile email services while traveling abroad.

The unique feature of ArrivedOK is that it notifies about one’s personal arrival instead of flight status in general. “Unlike other flight tracking services, which are based on general flight data from dispatcher centers, ArrivedOK tracks one’s actual appearance in the destination airport, so one’s friends and colleagues are 100 percent sure the person is landed okay.” – says Andrey Deriabin, Director Business Development at Eyeline Communications.

ArrivedOK has been selected as an Official Honoree in The 13th Annual Webby Awards in two categories: Best Use of GPS or Location Technology and Experimental & Innovation. ArrivedOK is currently translated into Japanese, French and Russian languages and available as free Public Beta in most countries of the world.

###arrivedok

Source: Time.com | Travel | Technology | Texting Back Home.
“When you’re traveling domestically, it’s easy to let people know you’ve arrived, but when flying abroad, what with the time difference and the roaming charges on your cell phone, it can be tricky. ArrivedOK lets you automatically tell the home team that you’ve landed, via text or email. Register your flight, along with the destination airport, estimated arrival time, along with any phone numbers or email addresses to which you’d like to send a notification. The ArrivedOK system tracks your cell phone and when you turn it on after landing it instantly sends “Arrived OK” messages to people on your list. If you become one of the beta testers now, you get a one-year free subscription.”

“The era of cheap travel is over. Its not the easiest time to involve in a global backpacking trip that lessens our wallets today, and the cost of international travel remains high. So you need to be pretty resourceful. And one of the big phenomena of recent years is couchsurfing – online networks that link you up with someone in a faraway place willing to let you stay in their home for free.”

See the BBC News piece about couchsurfing below. It’s about traveling to Tokyo, one of the world’s most expensive cities. So, if you decided to couch-surf to save money, why not saving a little bit more on international roaming charges by using ArrivedOK to automatically notify both your friends at home and your host at your destination that you just arrived?

Check it for yourself: if an Orange UK subscriber makes three 1 minute calls from Singapore to UK (to wife, mother, and boss), he totally pays £4,35. If, instead of calling, he sends 3 text messages, he pays £1,50. With ArrivedOk he can do the same for just £0,50. Not mentioning that it is completely free now, while Public Beta Testing lasts. See how it works.

External links:

• Couchsurfing in Wikipedia
• Perhaps the most well known network of such kind is CouchSurfing.com with over 700 thousand members in more than 200 countries.
• About Better Than the Van community
• Couchsurfing meets Twitter. Some interesting couchsurfing cases.