Some Travel Planning Tools

OK, so this is not all of the sites covered are are new, though a couple of them are. But I think it is worth visiting and commenting on the more established sites, instead of just covering the newest travel sites here.

Forbes.com has an article on titled "Travel Websites Get Personal" by Wendy Tanaka, which is accompanied by a slide show of Seven Top Sites for Planning Your Vacation. If you hate those slides shows as much as I do, here is a quick list of the seven sites that they list, along with my own comments on each:

1. Kayak.com - airline, hotel and vacation booking site, often finds the best deals in comparative studies - This is the one that I use the most on this list, though I normally enter it via the multi-site search engines of BookingBuddy.com or OneTime.com.
   
   
2. TripAdvisor.com - massive database of user-generated review, mostly of hotels - I use TripAdvisor occasionally to get information on hotels in places that I am very unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, I find the often conflicting reviews of the same place very confusing!
   
   
3. IgoUgo.com - user reviews of destinations, hotels, restaurants, etc., more like blog entries, now part of Travelocity.com. I used IgoUgo recently to plan daily activities in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I was too cheap to buy a guidebook for the short trip that I took there and looked at several sites like IgoUgo for tips on what to do and see, which I then printed out and took with me.
   
   
4. TripIt.com - automatically generates guides for trip itineraries that you enter - I tried this once but found the results too general and diverse and not well suited to my interests. If you are interested in this approach, you might want to try NileGuide.com, which is a new site that also creates a trip itinerary around your destination and interests. It currently only covers selected sites outside the US, but I think that will change over time.
   
   And there is also Ving.se's Trip Finder (image above), which does the same thing and is a 2008 Webby Award nominee for Travel, along with several other sites listed here. (Note that the the preference scales on Trip Finder are also offered on Tripbase.com, which I reviewed in June 2007.)
   
   
   
   
5. VibeAgent.com - and more user reviews, plus a Q&A section, and links to real-life Travel Agents - I have not used this site and looking at it I am not sure that I, personally, would find its features that useful. Others might be different, though.
   
   
6. Farecast.com - airlines and hotels, attempts to forecast future fares for mostly US cities (good luck with that these days of bankrupt airlines and sky-high oil prices!) - They are slowly expanding their forecasting coverages, but it basically does not work for international travel. Even for domestic US, I find the results of limited use as it cannot guarantee a certain future price (though I think there is a way to do that for a price).
   
   
7. InsideTrip.com - airline fares, but with a Trip Quality Score based on lost luggage, on-time departures, legroom, and flight duration - based on what you indicate as important (US only) - This beta site is the newest on the list and I have not used it, though the concept is interesting. Here is a screenshot of its results - the big number is the quality score, the bars on the left are where you adjust your preferences:
   
   
   

When I plan my trips (which I have been doing a lot of lately), I start from a Hubpages.com site that I created called "My Favorite Travel Websites". Here is a screenshot of that site (the photo of me and my daughter in Hawaii is from over 25 years ago):


On this Hubpage I post anything that I think I might use in planning my own personal and professional travels. Do I use everything that is there -- nope, but I might, some day. And even with this fairly comprehensive list, I often seem to find myself using new and different websites every time I plan a new trip. Go figure...

What is Travel 3.0 ?

From the many podcasts that I listen to, I have basically heard of two definitions for Web 3.0:

1. Web-Everywhere Technology - Always connected portable technology
2. Total Immersion Web - Virtual worlds and MMOGs

Web 1.0 was the static, expert knowledge web. Web 2.0 is the interactive, user knowledge web. So these definitions of Web 3.0 as an always connected technology and total environment knowledge web make sense to me.

And either way, the significance for travel and tourism is enormous. An everywhere web is a traveling web. It means being connected when you travel locally to work, to the grocery store, to the gym, as well as on business trips and family holidays. The Web 2.0 tools that I review on this website are among the leaders into this everywhere web space, which I predict will move toward greater convergence in the coming decades.

I have personally not bought into the the Second Life virtual world phenomenon, which I think is far from ready for prime time. In the long run, however, I think that online virtual worlds will become an important way of communicating with other people, initially, and with distant environments, ultimately. The newly emerging Web 2.0 sites that have video tours of hotels and destination are important baby steps in this directions -- even more so than the experimental hotel building in Second Life because they are more accessible for the masses.

Travel 3.0 is clearly not here, yet. However, because we can conceptualize it -- imagine what it will be like -- it is an important force shaping the visions of todays Travel 2.0 engineers and entrepreneurs.

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UPDATE: Check out the Sunverse.net blog, which is "All about Virtual Worlds and the Tourism Industry". The site mostly focuses on the development of real world tourism destinations in Second Life.

UPDATE: March 26, 2008: Bill Ryan, heard on Kenradio.com : "Web 2.0" was setting interoperability standards (including AJAX and web services, etc.) and creating communities and user-generated content. Web 2.0 was very exploitative of user generated content. "Web 3.0" is engaging more professionals to create user-generated data/content communities by compensating them. Also the semanitic web as the new tech-side supporting the new communities.

What would this mean for the travel and tourism industry? I am not sure. As an academic working on a couple of textbooks during my sabbatical, I think it is involving other academics who may adopt my books to create teaching and learning communities that provide value both for the teachers, students and the world at large. I had not thought about the potential role of compensation -- but am considering it now. I will be working on this over the summer.
------

(Originally posted on my Web 2.0 Travel Tools Blog - Alan A. Lew)

Travel Planning Your Way: TripBase.com & TripWiser.com

Links to two new travel planning website arrived my inbox in the last couple of months that I thought were creative and useful. They both help you decide where to go and what to do when you get their.


TripBase.com has a nice ajaxy interface where you indicate your preferences and trip characteristics, and it gives you a list of suggested destinations, which you can then click on to get more information. You can also click to remove the most popular destinations, for those looking for alternatives to the beaten paths. Variables that you can adjust include Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, Attractions, Dates, Departure city, Budget, Type of trip (backpacker, middle, luxury), Desired temperature, and Continent.


The interface is clean and quick, with limited scrolling and new page openings. Resources include a list of starred must see attractions and links to online magazine articles and prominent webistes, such as Wikitravel.com. There are also links to air, hotel and car rental reservations, though these did not work for me in the alpha-released website. Which kind of make me wonder how they are making money.


TripWiser.com is somewhat similar to TripBase, but makes its recommendations from a database of trips that have been saved by users. It has a very nice and easy to use interface for building a day-by-day itinerary for a trip, which you can make public or private. You can access and add suggestions for each day, and you give your trip tags which other people can then use to search the public database.

If you are searching for experiences, you can enter a trip name (destination and type) and receive a list of suggestions from the database. You can adjust your preferences by sliding Families-Couples, Luxury-Budget, Adventure-Relaxations, and Nature-Culture. The results change instantly as you change your preferences.


Some of the suggestions did not seem very real -- like an itinerary that included the San Diego Zoo, SeaWorld, Balboa Park and Mission Beach all in one day! (That itinerary was listed as a "Top Family Trip" -- I think my kids would kill me if I tried to make them do all that in one day.) Others, however, are very realistic and provide some great suggestions.

Interestingly, both websites make use of sliders as a way of showing preference. One big difference is that TripWiser is (currently) only for the US, while TripBase is international (yay!).

TalkShoe - Categories Listing - Travel

TalkShoe - Categories Listing - Travel

TalkShoe has become the destination for podcasters and podcast listeners who want to record live, synchronous, call-in episodes. I usually listen to these after they have been recorded, but if I were more on the ball, I could partcipate in them by either voice or text message. For both podcasters and podcast listeners this service is free, and although the content is entirely user generated, looking at their website they really do resemble a more formal podcast network.

The reason I bring it up TalkShoe here is because they have a Travel category that contains some interesting programs. You can listen to their most recent episodes and see when their next episodes are scheduled.

Not everyone is organized enough to schedule episodes in advance (I could never do that with my podcasts!), but some are. At the time of this mini-review, the following podcasts had scheduled programs:

• Florida Travel Deals -LorenGray 15 minutes (each week) of information regarding destinations in Florid... Next Episode Time: 06/07/07 02:30 PM EDT Talkcast ID: 27267
• PlanIt Podcast Live Call Ins - David Martin - Are you looking for the next great party or event location? Do you wa... Next Episode Time: 06/06/07 08:00 PM EDT Talkcast ID: 20394
• The TRAVELERS JOURNAL - David Bear - The TRAVELERS JOURNAL is a series of 2 minute audio postcards delivere... Next Episode Time: 06/04/07 09:00 AM EDT Talkcast ID: 14057

VeniVidiWiki -- Wiki Map Travel Guide

VeniVidiWiki: travel guide

VeniVidiWiki.eu is a Google map wiki mashup for attractions around the world. Anyone can add a POI (point of interest) to the map and provide as much as possible of the following information:

• Name of place/poi
• Category - those shown above are listed as POI with Video -- so they all have a video link; the full list of categories is listed on the left
  
• Description
• Website, and
• Photo and/or Video links

The wiki has a large number of sites, and crashed a few times when I was trying to view a lot of them. But in general it is quick and easy to navigate, and worth exploring to learn more about attractions in a place you may want to visit.

Ning - No More Excuses to Creating a Web 2.0 Travel Site

Ning.com is hottest new Web 2.0 tool to be announced this past week. Ning.com (now in version 2) allows anyone to easily create, through a drag and drop process, a Social Network on which members can post discussion items, blogs, photos and videos, and more. It is entirely free, with advertising, and $19/month without ads. Although it is in no way only for travel and tourism, there were close to 200 social networks that are tagged "travel" on the day that I wrote this.



I have created two social networks of my own at Ning.com. One is centered on my Travelography Travel News podcast (at http://travelnews.ning.com), and the other is on Responsible Travel and Sustainable Tourism (at http://responsibletravel.ning.com).


It was very easy to create these, though doing more customizing will probably take some time. In particular, I would like to add a Google Map mashup, which is found a quite a few of the social networks (such as the Travel Tips one, below). The networks with these maps appear to be from version 1 of Ning.com, and is not a standard tool built into version 2.0. In fact, if anyone has some tips on how to create a map mashup and add it to Ning.com, I would appreciate the help.



For a video introduction and tutorial to Ning.com, go to the Scoble Show blog. Also see Ning reviews on Tech Crunch and GigaOM.

--------------------
NEW (7 Sept 07): There are other web services similar to Ning that may meet your needs better. TechCrunch.com reviews nine of them here.

Step Up Travel - Sustainable Travel Does Web 2.0

"We promote responsible travel which emphasizes the importance of personal exchanges, deeper cultural understanding, genuine benefit to local people and their communities, preservation of the environment, and ultimately a more peaceful and equitable world."

Step Up Travel claims to be the first application of Web 2.0 to Responsible Travel, and I think they may be right. There are older websites devoted to responsible travel, including both resources on responsible travel issues and listings of responsible tour products. Two that I am familiar with are Planeta.com and the Big Volcano Ecotourism Centre. But both of these are in need of a major Web 2.0 face lift. And there is the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations, which is sometimes related to the more commercial National Geographic Traveler. As colorful and engaging as National Geographic is, however, it lacks a social interface and comes across as more institutional and less in touch with the "real" people in a destination.

So I think, yes, Step Up Travel is the first responsible travel site on the Web 2.0 era:

• It has an attractive and clean interface,
• it provides resources to help make travel more responsible,
• it appears to be making a concerted effort to market truly local products that support the destination, and
• it has a Travel Network for "Socially-minded Travelers to Connect with local people, Get off the beaten path, and Change the face of travel."

The Travel Network will be the real test of the success of Step Up Travel in achieving its goals of linking local people with concerned and responsible tourists. I have joined and it is successful.

2007 Travvies Nominees for Best Travel Blogs

Upgrade: Travel Better - 2007 Travvies: Meet the finalists, meet the judges, and vote!

The Upgrade: Travel Better blog is running a "Best Travel Blogs" contest. I just stumbled on this and thought it was a good idea -- at least a way of spreading the word about travel blogs.

I have only heard of a few of the blogs that made the final nominations, and the nomination process seemes a bit free-wheeling. But at least its a start. And I do hope to find some time to check out at least some of the nominees.

Voting ends on February 28th. So it you are the voting type, you need to head over their quickly.

MyGreatRides.com - The Online Motorcycle Community

MyGreatRides.com - The Online Motorcycle Community

"The open road meets the Info Superhighway at MyGreatRides.com, a virtual community for people who have a passion for riding."

I am personally not a biker in any way, and this website is still in beta (you need to sign up for an invitation). However, I thought it was an interesting niche travel idea, and one that may catch on with that very devoted segment of the recreation travel and tourism market. I did a quick search and did not find anything quite like what this site may be -- though I can't really tell until it become public. The closest thing was Total Motorcycle.com, but that seemed a lot more Web 1.0.

ALSO CHECKOUT: BikersWorld.com

TripConnect.com

"TripConnect allows you to get travel advice from a network of friends and others who share your tastes and interests." (from their website)

TripConnect started up in September 2006 and seems to being going strong. It is another social travel website, like 43places.com and Wayn.com. Like those, and others, TripConnect alows members to list, review and blog about places where you have been, and asking others members about places you want to go. TripConnect also allows you to suggest and join special interest groups (see the image above), which is less common elsewhere -- though others may also have added since the last time I looked! It does seem to be lacking a map interface, which is something that is really well done on the VCarious.com website.

Personally, I found TripConnect to be simple and straightforward - and that alone can give it a considerable advantage in the growing world on social travel websites.

Mobile Video Blogging Experiment

Jesse in Belgium sent me a link to a blog where he describes how he recently used his Nokia N91 to take videos, geotag them with a GPS receiver, and upload them to a travel blog -- while traveling in Thailand.

This is probably easier to do in the Europe or the US, and probably impossible in most of the areas of Nepal that I recently traveled through (click here).

Reactive: Web 2.0 for Travel and Tourism

Reactive, a UK and Australia-based web design agency, has released a free "white paper" titled Web 2.0 for Travel and Tourism. The white paper is a good summary of different aspects of Web 2.0 and examples of companies and websites that are using them. Each category (listed below) is discussed in three sections: (1) Basics, (2) How does it relate to the tourism and travel industry?, and (3) Examples. The major Web 2.0 categories are (from their blog):

• Blogging (Starwood, Eurostar and STA Travel)
• Podcasting (Lonely Planet, Orbitz, Virgin Atlantic, The Independent and Heartbeat guides)
  
• Social networking and user generated content (TripAdvisor, Yahoo, Contiki and Sheraton)
  
• Online video (YouTube, Travelistic and MGM Grand Las Vegas)
  
• RSS (Expedia, STA Travel, Virgin Holidays, Orbitz, and Conde Nast)
  
• Tagging (del.icio.us, Flickr and Travbuddy)
  
• Mash-ups and Open API’s (Locale, Virtual Tourism, Blogabond, 43 Places and TripAdvisor)
  
• Wikis (Wikitravel, World66 and TripAdvisor)
  
• AJAX (Kayak, Sidestep, Farecast and Google Maps)

You can request a copy of the white paper (.PDF) file from Reactive's blog.

ebookers.com's Travel Calendar

The UK-based online travel agency, ebookers.com has just introduced a new, downloadable desktop "Travel Calendar." This seems to be a first, at least for Travel 2.0 applications. You can use the online version of the calendar, but the preferred approach is to download it to your desktop to you can more easily personalize it with your own entries and access it off-line. The "travel" part of the calendar includes special events from around the world, National Geographic-like travel photographs, and, of course, special travel deals and contests that are pushed to the calendar from ebookers.com. You can customize the calendar to some degree and can print it.

You need to register with ebookers.com to to download or access the calendar online. Personally, I am not willing to register and install a program on my computer so I can have advertisements pushed to me. If I were a heavy user of ebookers.com, I might consider it -- maybe, maybe not. Either way, it is an interesting way to create a user relationship with a travel company, including user generated customization. It kind of reminds me of Yahoo Travel's Trip Planner. If successful, and I think it probably will be, I think we will see more Travel 2.0 calendaring in the future.

Trippermap.com - Making Flickr.com Geotags Easy!

I got an email today from some place called Trippermap.com. At first I thought it was spam and almost deleted it. But instead I opened it a took a look. -- and I am glad I did. Trippermap.com used to be called Flickrmap.com, and I do recall signing up for their service a while ago -- a little before Flickr.com added its own geotagging function. However, at that time I did not really feel like going through and adding geotags to my many Flickr pro account photos -- which now numbers almost 22,000 (most of which are "public").

Well, apparently the Trippermap folks have been updating their tools and I think the current version is great! What they sent me in the mail was a link to my Trippermap, which automatically locates any photo that I have tagged with a city and country. Not all my photos have that, but many do -- and I think it would be quite easy to add those tags to sets of photos in Flickr. I copied the code from the Tippermap site and plugged into my homepage (near the bottom) and now I have a nice size map tagged with icons for many of my public photos , along with a photo bar and java-based viewing function. I have tried a few other Flickr photo bars, but never really liked the results. This is the first one that I will probably keep on my website!

In addition to the basic city and country tag approach to locating photos, Trippermap also provides a Google Earth tool that allows you to use satellite images/maps to locate one or more photos more precisely, and then add the latitude and longitude coordinates direct to your Flickr site photo for searching and viewing using Flickr's map link. A video Tutorial is provided on the Trippermap.com on how to do this.

The free version of Trippermap only comes with a blank outline map of the world, on which photo icons appear, and only shows 200 Flickr photos. Trippermap Premium costs $9.75 year and includes full color Google Maps, all your photos, and Trip Route/Itinerary creation by drawing lines from one photo icon to the next. (Each icon, by the way, can include an unlimited number of photos.) They convinced me to go for the Premium account.


NEW: After posting the blog above, I received an email about Panoramio.com you can geolocate your photos via drag and drop interface and using Google Maps and you can watch uploaded photos inside Google Earth with a KML file (http://www.panoramio.com/panoramio.kml)." - I visited the site, but you cannot really tell what it does without registering, which I was not ready to do (and there was no Bugmenot.com). However, there were some cool sample travel maps on their blog page, and you can also search without registering (type in the name of a place to get a map with geotagged photos).

"Web 2.0: Too much of a good thing?" - Or Not Yet Enought?

Charles Leocha, publisher of the Tripso.com travel travel news and commentary site, recently posted an item titled "Web 2.0: Too much of a good thing?" that readers of this blog might find of interest. (You can also click on the title of this blog to go to his article.)

I read through his "article" (it is not a commentable blog) a couple of days ago and have been troubled by it since. He basically defines "Web 2.0" as user-generated websites, and cites two major uses of Web 2.0 for travel and tourism: sites where users rate places, and sites where users share travel experiences. He then cautions that both rating and sharing sites can be manipulated for insidious or untrustworthy commercial purposes, citing examples from MySpace.com and Sony Pictures -- not the most trustworthy spaces on the Internet, in my opinion.

Personally, I found the definition of Web 2.0 and the examples provided to be very narrow. Two key elements missing are (1) the community and social aspects of Web 2.0, which includes the importance of reputation and trust, and (2) the rich Internet user interfaces and applications (see Web 2.0 on Wikipedia).

Hotel ratings are one of the oldest, and still not very sophisticated, examples of Web 2.0 that Charles Leocha discusses. In fact, I am barely able to to even include TripAdvis0r.com in the realm of Web 2.0 -- it just feels more like a Web 1.0 free-for-all, lacking a real sense of community. I agree with Charles Leocha that it leaves the user with a sense of “Who can I trust?” I think that this is because its user base is so large (over 5 million reviews), that every possible opinion on any place can be found there. It lacks the strength of a Web 2.0 long tail niche community of like-minded users. In my opinion, TripAdvisor could use a major Web 2.0 work over -- more in the direction of 43Places.com. However, with their current use rates, I doubt that they have any incentive to do that!

Is Web 2.0 too much of a good thing? In my opinion, Travel 2.0 is in its infancy. Examples of websites that are exploring and pushing travel and tourism in the direction of user communities and rich interfaces are found in the postings on this blog.

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!)

EveryTrail - GPS and Photo Travel Blogging

If you are into GPS, then Everytrail.com is fairly simple concept. If you are not into GPS, you may become more interesting after checking out this interesting website.

Everytrail.com allows users to mashup their GPS tracks and geotag them with photos and short comments. Comments are indeed quite short, so it is not really a full travel blogging application. Instead, the focus is on sharing your treks with the world on a Google Map -- preferably a satellite image. The image draw as a line tracing the route, and the user adds photo and text icons. Zooming in and out is a breeze, making this a is a very nice way to virtually experience a place!

The treks that were up on the site when I visited seemed to be very limited in the number of photos and comments that they included. I wonder if there is a limit. I tend to take a lot of photos on most any trip that I take -- several hundred a day, of which I keep about half. It seems that a high density of photos taken at ground level, combined with the Google satellite image, and short text comments, could go a long way to provide a virtual travel experience. Visitors can also comment on the trails.

Evertrail.com is a fun site, worth checking out.

Farecast Expands to 75 Cities

Farecast is now available to for 75 cities! The website that predicts the best air fare prices on a given day based on historical data was previously only available for Boston and Seattle.

Farecast is basically an airline fare search engine. I am not sure just how good it is at that, and suggest that you compare it to your current favorites before you buy anything. What Farecast offers that is unique is a tool that tries to predict when the lowest prices can be found between any two cities. Unfortunately it appears that this tool only works for flights between the 75 cities that are in its database. I could not get a price on a flight between Phoenix and Fairbanks, for example, because Fairbanks is not in its database.

However, this is a big move up from the original two cities that previously made the site a curiosity, but not very useful. The intend to continue to grow the database, and I will look forward to the day when they also add international cities!

Tripmates.com: an American "Donkey Friends"?

I recently attended a tourism research conference in Singapore, some of the papers from which are appearing on the Geography for Travelers podcast. One of the things that I learned about, through two different researchers, was the Chinese concept of Donkey Friends. In Mandarin Chinese, the words Travel and Donkey have the same sound ("lyu"), though the tones are different. Because of this, the word Donkey has come to applied to a distinctly Chinese for or "backpacker" travel.

Using a social software travel website, the Head Donkey posts a notice that he or she is going to organize a trip on a certain date to a certain destination, and asks if anyone wants to join. Other Donkeys sign up by responding to this post. The trips are self organized and catered to save money, and everyone has their backpack. Like other tour groups, there are expected standards of behavior and role differentiations (some of which are along gendered lines), and people develop friendships that last beyond the one trip. Apparently the Chinese media has cautioned about the the potential dangers of traveling with strangers. Searching for information in English on Donkey Friend Travel online, however, did not result in anything that I could find.

This type of travel has not, to my knowledge, been very common in the US. Tripmates. com, however, may hope to change that. Tripmates is a new social travel site that share a lot in common with other social travel sites, such as 43Places.com, VCarious.com and MyLifeOfTravel.com, all of which I have used in the past, and the new TripConnect.com. This includes asking and sharing information about destinations and blogging about trips. What is different with Tripmates is an explicit focus on meeting new people. According to the website you can:

• Find a trip buddy so you don't have to travel alone
• Organize group trips with our exclusive Tripvite feature
• Meet locals or people traveling to your destination

There is an interest in this kind of travel, at least among a segment of the population in the west (see, for example, CouchSurfing.com). It will be interesting to see if traveling with Donkey Friends catches on outside of China.

FYI -Tripmates has also been reviewed breifly on Mashables.com

NEW: 6/21/07 - I see that TripMates has changed its name to TripUp.com - though the concept seems to be the same.

iAudioguide.com & Other Podcast Walking Tours

I recently received an email from Torsten Peters at iAudioguide.com with updated information about their free downloadable audio walking tours, which currently cover London, Barcelona, and Paris. Interestingly, he included a couple of competitor urls and told me that if I wanted more he would send them. I said yes, and boy was I surprised at the number of links he sent me. At some point, when I have some free time (ha!), I will write a review article on this topic, possibly for my journal, Tourism Geographies. But in the meantime, I wanted to share the links with all of you. Torsten noted that iAudioguide.com is free, while most of the others charge a fee for their downloads. If you know of any others that I should add to this list, send them to me (travelgeographer@gmail.com) and I will add them to this list.

Thanks to Torsten!

BTW - What should we be calling these? Auidoguides? Audiotours? Podguides? Podtours? ??

www.iAudioguide.com
www.soundtrek.org/ - Bangkok
www.podguides.net
www.parisaudioguides.com
www.bluebrolly.co.uk
www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/cs/uk/11/travel/podcast.html
www.visitscotland.com/sitewide/edinburghpodcast
www.talkingstreet.com/
www.footnotesaudiowalks.co.uk/
www.audiocitytour.com/
www.ijourneys.com/
www.ricksteves.com/news/travelnews/0602/audiotour.htm
NEW: Passport Guides for the PSP: http://psppassport.com/

related articles
www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/resources/st_travelswithipod0604/ipod.html
technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1681516,00.html
www.nytimes.com/2005/05/28/arts/design/28podc.html?ex=1274932800&en=db1ced6873dcc4b6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
www.macnewsworld.com/story/50096.html
www.csmonitor.com/2006/0412/p13s01-litr.html
www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,65945,00.html
tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1089780.php/Portable_tourist_guides_now_in_service

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