You are in a foreign country and hungry for Thai food. Whipping out your trusty, dog-earred travel guide book, you look under Dining Options and squint down to the small print to find a list of Thai restaurants. Here, you see three different restaurants with addresses given. Next, you pull out your half torn map that has guided you through the last two weeks of exploration.

Again, you squint to find the road names that match the restaurant listings. After you locate one of the restaurants, you then have to locate yourself on the map, and then try to figure out if the restaurant is within reasonable distance, and even worth going to. You are at this point exhausted after this headache-inducing exercise. And still hungry.

Thanks to technology, those days may soon be over. Today, a tech-savvy tourist would be prepared with a mobile device that has a navigational travel guide book downloaded on it. With that and a Global Positioning System, finding a Thai restaurant would be easy.

Software such as Earthcomber, which bills itself as a "new mobile lifestyle tool that helps you find exactly what you want, wherever you are", would make locating places in a foreign land as easy as calling an overseas friend on a roaming mobile phone.

"Access to relevant and mobile real-time information and transportability has impacted the evolution of design and the degree of product appropriateness, benefiting today's traveller in business and in leisure," said Ann-Marie Fleming in a report from investinginwireless.com.

Indeed it has, and will even more in the next few years to come. The wireless and mobile world is coming upon travel as quick as mobile phone technology has to the world in the last few years. "The new world of the always-connected mobile traveller is arriving faster than the industry can adapt. New applications such as location based services (LBS) will become a key differentiator for the frequent traveller and should be considered enhancements to existing customer service initiatives. We are moving away from the view of mobile technology as the next "cool" thing to an understanding that wireless communication is an essential part of the new travel process," explains Norman L. Rose, President of Travel Tech Consulting and Analyst for Phocuswright.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS), for example, is already becoming a mainstream feature in some countries. In the US, portable personal device maker Palm has GPS kits that provide maps and turns your hand or handheld into a complete navigation solution. According to Palm, GPS has reached critical mass numbers and allows for more development in this area. Taking the real-time information to another level, Palm also offers a software application called Traffic for its smartphones that uses road sensors to show the speed traffic is moving on major highways. You can therefore bookmark regular intersections and it will tell you how fast traffic is flowing and reports all incidents, accidents and constructions along roads.

Others like Garmin International have developed voice-prompted GPS offering with a real-time traffic interface, language translator, travel books, MP3 player, an audio book player, a photo viewer and a National GEO-coded coupon book.

Fast forward a few years. You are travelling in a foreign country and you are hungry for Thai food. You whip out your mobile device and you launch your trusty travel guide application and turn on your Global Positioning System. You mark your location with a red X, next you tap on a "Look List" and scroll down to the restaurants category. You find a list of Thai restaurants within seconds. You are now able to narrow your search done with even more criteria such as how much you wanted to spend, and how far you wanted to walk to get there. In another few seconds, you pull out a list of three suitable restaurants. At this point, you are even told that one of the restaurants has only two tables still available, and that you should make an immediate call to reserve it.

You do so and then you take a leisurely stroll to the restaurant which is just a few blocks away. The navigational maps on your device make sure you don't take any wrong turns to get there. You settle down to your Thai meal and you think "how did we ever do it before with just guide books and paper maps?"

© 2006 Abacus International. http://www.travelsmart-asia.com