World in Focus, the biggest and best photo context of the year, is into full swing. The drawback is that it costs $12 to enter the contest, but the prizes include trips to Tanzania and St. Lucia, so I think it’s worth a shot. Also, I think winning the competition is anyone’s game, as I was very surprised by last year’s winner.

You can enter the contest here.

Photo: one that I’m thinking of submitting. It’s one of a couple of different pictures from Morocco that I like, but I’m indecisive when it comes to choices like this.

While the trend in Europe is towards disappearing boarders (yay Schengun!) the US and Mexico went the opposite direction on the first of this month:

Beginning June 1, 2009
U.S. citizens entering the United States at sea or land ports of entry are required to have documents that comply with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), most commonly a U.S. passport, a passport card, a trusted traveler card such as NEXUS, SENTRI or FAST, or an enhanced driver’s license. See the complete list of WHTI-compliant documents.

On the upside hopefully that means more Americans will be getting passports and will then be encouraged to travel further afield. On the downside, it bet it means that fewer Americans will visit Mexico, and when there is less cultural interaction, everyone loses. Too bad.

Applications are open today for a new travel competition – Taiwan’s “Best Trip in the World” contest. It’s not dissimilar from Queensland’s recent contest, save one major drawback: it costs a lot to win. You have to pay for your own flights to Taiwan for the final round of the competition. Still, not a bad deal since you can win over USD 20,000 30,000 to travel around Taiwan for a month.

Photo by Jaako under Creative Commons.

Designer Dustin Curtis rightly points out that American Airline’s website sucks. The functionality you want is buried amongst all sorts of other content, and even then the search isn’t that great. And American Airlines isn’t the online airline with an annoying web page. In fact, I can’t find one I like, just ones that I don’t like, with Ryanair’s page topping the list of worst sites – it advertises flights from distant airports and the search doesn’t let you search all airports for a city.

Mr. Curtis proposes a redesign that reminds me a good deal of Kayak.com – my favourite site to search for flights. His looks like this:

The American Airline’s unofficial response to Mr. Curtis is simply depressing and reveals why airline pages sucks so hard. Quite simply: internal politics. Everyone has some vested interest in putting something on the website, and rather than focus on the other all user experience, everyone tosses something up there to make one big mess. I won’t hold my breath for a good airline site to come along, thankfully we don’t have to deal with them that much thanks to the joy of Kayak.