The Opportunity: Advanced Custom Travel
This page will briefly highlight the market for new travel resources, and throw down some thoughts on the problems that specifically need to be addressed for better travel information. Every year, travelers want to go further and further off the beaten track. Guidebooks, the spread of English as the lingua franca in the third world, and the pervasiveness of technology makes it easier than ever to do that. With the current infrastructure for travel in place, no longer should package tours be the de facto way to spend a vacation. Really, we should think about traveling as anything we dream it to be; from mountaineering alone in the Pakistani Himalayas, to taking your family across China by train. Travel in the 2010s is a custom experience.
With the idea of custom travel in mind -- planning trips of a lifetime, and things like that -- this page will summarize some awesome tools to travel better. Then it will look into the shortcoming of a few big tools - travel information from guidebooks and websites, and discuss ways to make them better.
Game Changing Travel Tools:
Iphone/Smart Phones
Amazon Kindle/Ipad:\v
Looxcie:
Couchsurfing.org:
TripLingo
Hostels.com/Hostelbookers.com/Hotelscombined.com
This page
With the idea of custom travel in mind -- planning trips of a lifetime, and things like that -- this page will summarize some awesome tools to travel better. Then it will look into the shortcoming of a few big tools - travel information from guidebooks and websites, and discuss ways to make them better.
Game Changing Travel Tools:
Iphone/Smart Phones
Amazon Kindle/Ipad:\v
Looxcie:
Couchsurfing.org:
TripLingo
Hostels.com/Hostelbookers.com/Hotelscombined.com
This page
Travelers are more sophisticated than ever, and want to craft their own personalized travels! For travel information - logistics, maps, suggestions, the best resources we have are guidebooks and travel-advice sites, both of which are useful, but lack a lot:
Inadequate Guidebooks: Guidebook writers, like those employed by Lonely Planet, Frommer's, Rough Guide, Let's Go, and more, do a damn good job of instructing folks on how to travel. We assume (and it seems, rightfully so) that they work hard to provide reliable content, but even so, they are few in number, trudging through gargantuan-sized territories. Their burden is simply too large. Places change, facts become outdated. If you have spent any substantial amount of time trekking through an entire country with a guidebook, the gaps in information become crystal clear. Guidebooks' lack of depth falters.
Lackadaisical Travel Sites: It is astonishing that in the world of high quality crowdsourced information, TripAdvisor and WikiTravel do not succeed in providing higher quality information. While TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel site, has a fantastic quantity if user-generated content, it falls far short of being a great crowdsourced solution to travel guides. It does not have user-generated systems for travel logistics, transportation and safety other than its forum and their search engines. It has poor ratings algorithms and poor game mechanics, far inferior to analogous sites like Yelp and Jigsaw! While it lets anyone submit a review about a listed hotel, it curates all submissions, which discourages submission of new sights, thus discouraging absolute FINDS -- great guesthouses, hostels, and restaurants -- from inclusion. Frankly, it works best with HIGH-END tourism. Wikitravel,
The problem, and the opportunity, is simple! Systems, processes and incentives to create high-quality crowdsourced travel information are not there...this is important. The lack of systems (be it a points or reputation-based system to encourage high quality content), processes (processes of gathering and submitting information, creating cumulative reviews) and incentives (revenue or points-based system to incentivize travelers to gather valuable, sometimes hard-to-find content). This is not to say that the information from sites like TripAdvisor is meaningless...if anything it is a call to TripAdvisor to learn from Salesforce.com, Jigsaw.com, Couchsurfing.org and even crystal-clear hostel-ranking sites like Hostelworld.com and Hostelbookers.com.
Please see "Lone Dodo Travel Primers" and "Selling Niche Travel Guides" to understand the story of how crowdsourced information can be encouraged and created successfully.