Yes, we know chances are slim that very many people will look back on this piece a year from now and say, “Aha! You blew that prediction.” That offers us safety of a sort, we suppose. Still, we feel pretty confident about our prognostications: 

Prediction No. 1: Watch for offbeat destinations to become popular  

Yes, We’re defining offbeat to mean countries that are underrated or under appreciated, and are still tied to the dollar (which makes them vacation bargains compared to Europe). Among them: 

China – Forget the folk wisdom that says Japan is still the world’s number two economy: At $6.5 trillion (a little more than half the size of the U.S. economy), China has left Japan in the dust and is emerging as the next great player on the world stage.  

While it’s doing that, it’s building infrastructure at a furious pace: roads, airports, hotels and other traveler-friendly facilities. At the same time, this vast country, just a smidgen smaller than Canada, has scores of distinct ethnic cultures and enclaves, and a varied geography – all the ingredients for an intriguing vacation. China is an entire world in one country, as quaint or sophisticated as any traveler could want. 

Best of all, China has pegged its economy to the dollar. As long as that’s the case, you can expect your money to carry a desirable amount of clout there.  

Russia – The Russian economy is now three times the size it was under the communists, which means there have been substantial improvements in amenities for travelers. The country is still very poor relative to the U.S. or the European Union, but has an immensely rich store of cultural treasures, such as the Hermitage and the Kremlin, as well as such spectacular natural wonders as Lake Baikal and the Alaska-like Kamchatka Peninsula.  

Peru, Chile and Argentina – If you’ve seen The Motorcycle Diaries, a recent indie film that dramatizes a 1952 road trip  the young pre-Stalinist Che Guevara took with a friend into Patagonia, the Andes and the Amazon, you have an idea of how gorgeous and uncluttered South American landscapes are. These three countries not only boast spectacular scenery, ranging from desert and high mountains to gleaming lakes and temperate rainforests, their travel infrastructures have improved dramatically in the past decade. 

This is especially true with Chile. This fourth member of NAFTA has grown its economy by taking advantage of its mid-section's Mediterranean climate to make itself a powerhouse producer of inexpensive wine and winter fruit for the Canadian and U.S. markets. Much of the profits are showing up in a growing, increasingly eco-friendly travel industry. 

Australia and New Zealand – Two of the biggest pop events of the past four years have put these two distant nations on travelers’ maps: the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed on New Zealand’s South Island. To the enticements of incredibly varied geography and polite English-speaking hosts, the two countries also are still tied to the dollar. 

Prediction No. 2: The new Airbus A380 will change travel, but not as much as predicted 

Airbus will introduce its gargantuan 747-slayer, the 555-passenger A380 sometime next fall. The two-deck plane, which will require many airports to reconfigure their gates, holds out the prospect of cheaper air travel simply because it can haul so many people at once. Add to its capacity efficiencies brought about by improvements in wing and engine design, and the A380 looks on paper to be the plane of the next generation. 

For the U.S. market, that may be the case. But for the Europeans, we’re not so sure. Airbus Industry's mock-ups of the A380 show a spacious interior that can accommodate a lounge, and even a gym. The idea is that the A380’s size will allow a level of comfort unseen since the sky bars on Boeing's 747s when they first began flying in the early 1970s.   

But we remember how quickly those amenities disappeared when fuel prices and U.S. deregulation of its airline industry made it necessary to fill every inch of airplanes’ interior spaces with revenue-generating passenger seats. Of course, the flagship European airlines, which are the only ones that can justify and afford A380s, are often subsidized by their national governments.  

Those subsidies give them a surface advantage in that they can offer lounges in lieu of seats and not have to account for  the loss of revenue. But mainland Europe’s two greatest economies, France and Germany, are barely growing and are straining under increasing demands from an ageing population that isn’t producing enough young workers to pay for its generous retirement programs. Expenses like airline subsidies will be among the first that anxious governments will abandon in order to rescue more important social programs. 

In the end, the A380 will be a somewhat larger, posher 747. But don’t expect it to radically change travel in the sense of comfort or expense. There’s no such thing as a 240-foot-long magic pill. 

Prediction No. 3: New travel search technology will have online agencies shaking in their boots 

In a few months, you’ll be familiar with the following names: Yahoo/FareChase, SideStep, Kayak Software/America Online, Mobissimo, Qixo. They’re the monikers of powerful new travel search engines that have online agencies like Priceline, Orbitz and Travelocity biting their nails. 

Here’s why: The new breed of search engines quickly chase down the lowest-priced travel packages they can find on the Internet and deliver them to the travel consumer. In doing so, they bypass the above-named online agencies that have spent fortunes building brand awareness. At the same time, the new engines put companies like Yahoo and AOL into the travel business – a lucrative sideline. 

The legacy agencies are hoping that although their current customers will probably flirt with the new engines, ultimately they'll remain loyal and come back. They think that although the new engines may turn up rock-bottom prices, such low prices will produce shoddy or disappointing results. Consumers, remembering the legacy agencies’ previous good performances, will abandon the usurpers and come home.  

The only problem with that fond hope is that there isn't much to support it. The big online agencies have always been impersonal selling machines fronting for certain airlines or package tour operators. And their thin operating margins mean their “travel agents” are almost invariably inexperienced minimum-wage workers. The chances of these agencies looking great in comparison to whatever the new-era search engines can turn up don’t look so hot. 

As for us, we realize that our users will go check out the new technology, too. But our advantage, compared to the legacy agencies, is that we serve a niche that the big boys can’t and won’t: the specialty cultural tour market. There simply aren’t any bargain-basement deals to be found on most specialty tour packages. If there are only a handful of operators, say, offering tours of Tuscan kitchens, and their individual package components are unique or different, they’re not going bash one another by knocking down their prices to attract bargain hunters via a new-style search engine. 

So, there will continue to be a place for travel portals like ours, where people can come and find honest and hard-to-get information. We suspect that the new search engines will glom onto us, too, once it becomes evident how many riches are waiting here -- and regardless of whether they're "bargains" or not.