The World According to the Crowd
| Remember the days when you had to rely on guidebooks such as Let’s go, Rough Guides and Lonely Planet for travel advise whenever you were planning a summer holiday? | |
| This was the case in 1998 when I headed on my first overland trip across South East Asia. I remember walking into Jysk Rejsebureau, (the favorite travel agency amongst backpackers in Aarhus) to collect my flight |
 |
| The Internet has changed all this. On a recent trip to Vietnam I didn’t see very many travelers carrying around their guidebooks, and where there used to be bookshops selling second-hand guidebooks there was now fancy Internet café’s. Here travelers’ gathered in large numbers researching for their onward travel, reading through information on the growing number of great online travel resources. But not only have a seen how content has moved from the printed guidebook on to the web, much of the travel content found online is not published by professionals but created by regular travelers wanting to share their travel experiences.One such website is WikiTravel. The team behind this site has set out to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide based on user generated content. Relying on the contribution of “Wikitravelers” from around the globe, more than 19,000 destination guides are now available on WikiTravel covering everything from tourist attractions to recommended hotels and restaurants.A Nielsen study in 2007 concluded that consumer recommendations such as those found on WikiTravel are the most credible form of advertising. A conScore analysis backed this and concluded that consumers trust reviews generated by fellow consumers much higher than those generated by professionals, and according to the “US Online Travel Consumer Survey, 2008,” 40 percent of all travelers are now using content from other consumers in their travel decisions.
As we look ahead we will without doubt see even more user generated content flood the Internet and therefore it will be interesting to see what kind of innovative use can be made with all this great data. I was recently introduced to a technology and travel startup in San Francisco called Offbeat Guides. Offbeat Guides allows you to create your own personalized (printed) travel guide. In five simple steps you can create a personalized guide including maps and images based on your travel destination and travel dates. By drawing in user generated content Offbeat Guides ensures that you will always get up to date content written and validated by fellow travelers. I look forward to following David L. Sifry (the Technorati founder) and his team at Offbeat Guides (including a former Lonely Planet employee) as they work towards publicly launching the Offbeat Guides later this year. Check out the beta site here. Do you know of any other travel related publication that draws on user generated content and creates some sort of tangible product, do let me know in a comment. |
Many thanks for the kind words about Offbeat Guides! We’re still in private beta, but are busy building out features to enable people to easily create and share travel guides for over 30,000 different destinations. Go to http://www.offbeatguides.com/ where we’re letting people in on a first-come, first-serve basis as we roll out new features and bug fixes.
Right now, we’re not shipping books outside of the USA, but you can still use the site to get PDFs until we roll out international fulfillment and shipping…
Dave