A Nature Trip in Costa Rica

China is one of those places where there has long been a real appeal to being on a tour. Having expert help to organize the logistics (and a bilingual guide on the ground) takes some of the anxiety out of visiting what can be a fairly overwhelming country. But now, with China's drive to modernize, planning a trip yourself is getting easier. The country's tourism industry is undergoing dramatic improvements: More Western hotels are opening in major cities, taxi drivers are being encouraged to learn some English, and bilingual travel agencies and websites are cropping up. Booking your own transportation to and within China will not only give you more flexibility in deciding where to go, it's also a way to save money. FLYING THERE Many travel agencies that specialize in U.S.–China flights have deals with airline consolidators to sell bulk-rate tickets, which are cheaper than the fares found on the airlines' websites but also usually more restrictive. KDCal Travel, a travel agency based in Los Angeles, sells deeply discounted tickets to China on its website, uschinatrip.com. Most tickets are on flights operated by airlines such as China Eastern and Cathay Pacific, and some have restricted travel dates and a minimum six-night stay. After you input your travel dates and select a ticket, you have to wait a day or so for an agent to contact you about purchasing the fare. If you have no idea what a good fare is, go to TravelSuperLink.com, where users post the prices they've recently paid for tickets and where they bought them. One passenger, for instance, paid $790 for a round-trip Boston–Shanghai ticket this spring on American Airlines, using a New York City travel agency called China Express International Travel & Tour (866/978-4542). The site also provides phone numbers for more than a dozen agencies with English-speaking sales assistants. INTERNAL FLIGHTS For travel within China, check the prices of flights on China-based travel search engines such as Ctrip (Ctrip) and eLong (eLong), as they're cheaper than what you'll find on Expedia or even on Kayak. Ctrip and eLong—both of which are in English—have deals with domestic carriers to offer reduced prices for tickets, usually with restrictions such as no refunds for cancellations and fees for changing travel dates. The sites also sell one-way tickets, allowing you to search different airlines for the lowest possible fare for each leg of a trip. For example, Expedia's lowest fare for a round-trip ticket between Shanghai and Beijing on Air China in June was $365. For the same dates, eLong turned up a total price of $224 for two one-way tickets between the cities, one leg on Shanghai Airlines and the other on Air China. Buying tickets from these companies is relatively easy. Both sites accept international credit cards and issue e-tickets. For eLong, however, you'll also have to e-mail or fax copies of your credit card and passport to the ticket office in China before the ticket is issued (jpts@corp.elong.com, fax 011-86/10-6432-7913). TRAIN TRAVEL New CRH bullet trains, which reach speeds of up to 185 miles per hour, have shortened the travel time on the rails between many tourist centers in China. The trip between Shanghai and Suzhou is just 40 minutes on the CRH (from $7 for a round-trip ticket), compared with two hours on the local train. The bullet train between Beijing and Shanghai (from $92 for a round-trip ticket) takes 10 hours—six hours less than the local train. The best way to book round-trip tickets is to e-mail or call a travel agency in China. Kingdom Travel in Beijing will arrange tickets up to 10 days in advance for a $7 fee and deliver them to your hotel (011-86/10-5870-3388, kingdomtravel.com.cn). Some hotels will also get tickets for you, but they may only handle one-way fares. Buying your own tickets is an option, though train stations in China are chaotic, with lots of jostling and line jumping. Unless you know a few choice words in Mandarin, you might want to spare yourself the trouble.

Our anonymous confessor has worked as both a ticket agent and a departure-gate agent for a major airline. He has since left the industry. NO TRAINING New airline ticket and departure-gate agents are hard to find these days. Not only are the wages awful, but flying for free—the one perk of the job—is becoming virtually impossible because planes are always packed with paying customers. To save money, many airlines also aren't giving new employees the same job training they once received, leaving inexperienced agents on the front line to deal with passenger complaints. Once, on a trip I took after I had stopped working as a ticket agent, I had to show a new hire where to look in the system to find my reservation—she had no idea what she was doing. CUT OFF The airline I worked for had a very antiquated computer system. We had about a dozen operating systems in the company. There were separate systems for mapping flight routes, filing lost-luggage claims, and keeping track of reservations—but not all of them could relay data to each other. To top it all off, the computers at the departure gates didn't have Internet access. The popular belief among disgruntled travelers that gate agents purposely keep passengers in the dark about flight delays isn't really true—sometimes the agent is the last one to know what's going on. GOOD BEHAVIOR It used to be that if you tried a little smooth talking or even brought a cookie to the gate agent, you might be able to score an upgrade. Not anymore. Because the airlines are increasingly focused on the bottom line, free upgrades are incredibly hard to come by. Still, it pays to be nice to the agents: After a few kind words, they may go out of their way to reroute you on a partner airline if your flight is delayed. I turned on the charm myself one time when I was facing a long delay on the way to the Caribbean. Smiling politely, I went to a partner airline's ticket counter and asked the agent to please re­route me. Several hours later, I was lying on the beach, sipping a tropical drink. PERSONAL INFO Ticket agents are always updating Passenger Name Records, or PNRs—these computer files, which contain basic details on passengers' trips, are accessible to most agents at check-in counters and departure gates. Agents generally use PNRs to record special requests by passengers, but sometimes they also comment on a person's behavior. A friend of mine discovered this after she had a heated argument with a ticket agent about getting an upgrade on a flight to London. When she reached her gate and inquired again, the agent remarked on her "inappropriate behavior" at check-in, and my friend was stuck with her economy-class seat. The details in PNRs are also fodder for airline-employee gossip, especially when shocking behavior is involved. Passengers once complained about a woman breast-feeding her Chihuahua (I kid you not) on board a flight, and an airport supervisor in the arrival city put the incident in her PNR. Within hours, a gate agent came upon the PNR and shared it with countless other agents across the country. In fact, my former colleagues and I still talk about it to this day!

At a noteworthy new website, Zicasso, travel agents and tour operators bid for your business. Here's how it works: You describe what you're looking for—flights, lodging, excursions, transfers, whatever—and within a few days, you'll receive up to four competing trip itineraries. You can ignore them (the matching process is free), request changes to the itineraries, or proceed with one (you pay the agent directly). The service works for countries all around the world.

1. TRIPQUALITY DASHBOARD InsideTrip starts with 12 basic categories to tabulate a flight's TripQuality score. To customize a search, just unclick the factors in the dashboard that aren't important to you and then click Recalculate TripQuality. (If you only have a carry-on bag, for instance, you won't care about the airline's lost-luggage ranking.) The site, unfortunately, doesn't take into account everything that affects a flight experience—you can't select amenities like seat-back TVs or other in-flight entertainment options. Some of the factors used to determine the score, meanwhile, seem less relevant than others, such as the historical load factor (the average percentage of seats occupied on the airline's flights a year before the booking date). Most flights run at near-full capacity these days anyway. 2. BOOKING A FLIGHT If you want to buy a ticket, InsideTrip directs you to Orbitz. Keep in mind, though, that Orbitz charges a fee of $5 to $13 (InsideTrip factors in the fee), so you may want to buy the ticket on the airline's website instead. Orbitz and InsideTrip search the same airlines, including some (but not all) international carriers. The only major domestic airline the two sites don't search is Southwest. 3. CONNECTION TIME One of the most user-friendly features of the site is the bar showing exactly how long you'll be sitting in an airport during a layover. (Move your cursor over the bar to make layover details appear in a box.) To eliminate flights with long layovers, adjust the tabs on the Connection Time ruler on the left side of the page, and the site will quickly refine the search results. 4. EASE RATINGS A lot of the data on the site isn't available anywhere else. InsideTrip researched gate locations at major airports, for example, because one of the factors it uses to determine a flight's ease is whether you have to take a bus or a train to reach the gate. For connection times, the website considers between 45 and 90 minutes to be ideal; a flight loses TripQuality points if a layover is longer or if it's so brief that you risk missing your connecting flight. 5. OVERALL SCORE InsideTrip uses statistics from the government and the airlines, as well as its own research on flights, to determine the TripQuality ratings. The best possible TripQuality score is 100, but perfection is nearly impossible. Great flights receive scores from the mid-80s to the 90s. Some factors are weighed more heavily than others in determining the final tally—nonstops, for one, generally score much higher than flights with layovers. The top score on this route was an 85 for a nonstop flight on Northwest. Whether it's worth $357 is your call.