Travel Videos - Coming to a PC near you now!

Travel videos appear to be the hottest thing on Travel 2.0 websites! This really hit me when, in two days I received announcement of new travel videos from the discount travel agency, Travelzoo.com and from the social travel site Tripmates.com.

• Travel Zoo Unleasehed Travel Videos currently has three 20 minute long videos up: Washington DC, Atlantic City NJ, and Lower Manhattan NY. These have a professional polish, some of which are hosted by budding celebrities.
  
  
• Tripmates' Trip Flix videos are uploaded by site members, and, or course, are much shorter and less professional. It is more of a Youtube.com experience, though probably more focused on sharing destination experiences.
  
• -- Also like this is ZoomAndGo.com
• -- And a note from Indra: VCarious.com also has a Travel Video service. Users can upload their own travel videos, along with their photos. Videos and photos can be attached to the journals and travel guides. Everything can be explored using maps.
  

There are, however, a bunch of other sites with travel videos, include YouTube.com, the recent $1.6 billion sale of which has probably prompted this sudden rush to enter the video marketplace. Among them are:

• TurnHere: Short Films, Cool Places - "Free video guides for travel, restaurants, hotels, local events & music". Turn Here is very much place-based. Its professional and semi-professionally produced videos are organized around destinations. The major ones are the San Francisco Bay area, New York metro area, and the Los Angeles metro area. Other cities are also listed, though with fewer films. The videos are really nice -- better than most of my home videos. -
  
  
• Travelistic: Videos for Travelers - "We host all kinds of travel videos, including user uploads, professional content, and tourist board videos". You can search videos on this site by Tags, Places (from a google map that shows the number of videos for each country), and People (that is, the people who made the video).

I did a quick search for other travel video websites and came up with a bunch of them. Many are commercial sites that sell travel videos, and which I am not really interested in covering here. Free sites include a number of destination convention and visitor bureau sites. Some others that are worth checking out are:

• Discovery Channel Video Tours of US National Parks (using Google Earth)
• Travelago.com - Similar to TurnHere - lists itself as having one of the largest collections of destination and attraction videos
  
• TravelRapidly.com - Videos on a wide range of attractions in Arizona (if you are planning a visit to my home state!)