More airports consider ditching TSA

Contributing editor Sean O'Neill will be answering your travel questions today, Tuesday, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET, in a live chat. Follow Budget Travel's Twitter profile @budgettravel to ask your questions or share your own travel tips. If you can't make the chat, tune in next week—same time, same station. If you're savvy enough about Twitter to know what a hashtag is, you may prefer to follow the conversation via #TravelTuesday. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Ask Trip Coach: Farmstays Ask Trip Coach: Ocean Cruising Ask Trip Coach: House Swapping

Since the beginning of Internet Time, there has been Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, a place where frequent travelers trade tips with each other. Facebook came along, of course, and now many people simply post a status update to draw out tips from their connections. (For example: "What should I do in Brussels next week?") But your friends and family members may not be as savvy or passionate about travel as you are. So advice from Facebook connections only takes you so far. Same thing with sites like TripIt and Dopplr and TripLine, which have tools to alert your connections about your travels. Some start-ups are trying to create communities of travelers that can interact with each other in a Facebook-style format. My favorite of these is Gogobot. To take full advantage of this site, you need to be willing to be friendly with strangers. Because it is people you've never met who may have the most up-to-date scoop on the best restaurants in L.A., or the smartest way to get to downtown from the airport during a transit strike in Paris. If you're comfortable with creating a new persona for yourself as a capital-T traveler, GogoBot is for you. During my recent weeks of trying it, I've been amazed at the high-quality of tips that users share with each other. The one downside is that Gogbot's community is still fairly small. A site with a much larger pool of travel hobbyists—half-a-million travelers, in fact—is IgoUgo, a community that's overseen by Travelocity. This past fall, it added social tools, such as an "I've Been Here" feature and a "Get Ideas from Other Travelers" button, which together can help you to find like-minded travelers and learn about their tips as well as share your own advice. UPDATE 1p.m.ET: I also ought to mention Travellerspoint, a travel community with 350,000-plus members, who typically seem to travel more frequently than the average American—and are eager to share their insights. Looking for good guesthouses in Goa, India? That's the level of advice you'll find here. On the opposite end of the marketing scale, heavily-promoted site WAYN has been successful at signing up lots of users, but activity has been stagnant in recent years. WAYN used to have a travel-knowledge focus and stand for "Where Are You Now." Today it seems to be more focused on getting users to date each other. Some sites help travelers meet up in real life, once you've already arrived at your destination. Perhaps the best of these sites is Couch Surfing, a site for finding free and cheap places to stay in people's homes. It has a forum for meetups in cities worldwide. Budget Travel also recently covered five other sites that help you make friends on the road. Especially promising is Tripping.com, a social networking site that connects travelers in more than 100 countries. The site stands out for its wide range of safety mechanisms, such as references, anonymous ratings, video validation, and an emergency hotline for all of its members. How good are these sites? Budget Travel recently sent a writer to Istanbul to test many of these online tools. With a smartphone in each hand, Arianne Cohen tested the limits of online networking in a foreign land. No guidebooks. No language skills. Only social media and mobile apps. (Her story: "The Connected Traveler.") It was fun, but it wasn't easy. One tool Cohen says worked well is InterNations.org. She wrote that it's "a global expat community with 230 local branches. If your own social network falls through, this is the place to track down locals who speak your language." So what say you? What's the best social network for travel? MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Five sites that help you make friends on the road Scavenger hunts by cell phone are all the rage "Istanbul with Only Social Media as a Guide."

Last fall, the airline marriage of United and Continental was given the legal OK. The new company, called United, is the world's largest airline. It will be a year before United and Continental fly planes as one team. For now, each of the airlines continues to sell tickets and handle customer problems on its own. It will be several months before Continental customers can use United's EasyCheck-in kiosks, ticket counters, or website for check-in. What about frequent-flier miles? The reward programs won't merge for another year or so. Rest assured that mileage balances and status levels will carry over to a merged rewards program. That said, there are some strategies to take now. If you have a Continental credit card tied to the airline's frequent-flier program (and earning a mile for every dollar or so you spend), you should keep using it. You may receive bonus perks soon. During the similar Northwest and Delta merger, holders of Northwest credit cards received bonus miles for linking their account with a Delta Skymiles account. A similar set of bonuses may come from Continental being swallowed up by United. Compare options of various airline credit cards for travelers at WebFlyer. If you have a lot of American Express Membership Rewards miles, you have until next September to trade them for Continental miles, which will convert to United miles. In many cases, this is a smart trade. All that said, the best value in loyalty cards is generally in hotel cards, which can still rack up airline miles. Consider the Starwood AmEx card. This card has the option to transfer Starwood points to many airlines, such as American, Delta, and US Airways, and receive a bonus. For example, 20,000 hotel points would become 25,000 airline miles. If you only travel a couple times a year, a hotel card is usually the most reliable choice—both for earning and redeeming points (because there are usually many options at destinations everywhere, while you may not fly the same airline often during a single year). Are you a mileage junkie? If you have earned enough miles for status in either program, you should read United's new frequently-asked-questions page, InsideFlyer's summary of changes, an explanation of how United makes it difficult to redeem awards on partner Star Alliance member flights, and mileage-maven Gary Leff's surprisingly optimistic take on what will happen next. [FUN FACTS: Delta, thanks to its merger with Northwest, will be second largest worldwide, after United and Continental. But Southwest will be the second-largest airline in the U.S. in terms of number of passengers flown domestically, once its merger with AirTran is wrapped up later this year.] MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL How to game Continental's new FareLock service Southwest waters down its Rapid Rewards program Why you won't find American's fares on Expedia or Orbitz