We love Tim Wu's online travel roadtest
Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007, 1:33 AM by Lonely Planet
As you might imagine, here at Lonely Planet we're fascinated by sites like Wikitravel and World66, where travellers build something not dissimilar from an online guidebook. The idea is the info is kept fresh by regularamendments and additions, just like Wikipedia.
We've always thought we were excited because we live & breathe making travel content here. Now we know we're not alone.
How so? As everyone gathered back in Lonely Planet's London office after Easter trips to Whitstable, Brighton and Bury St. Edmunds we read Tim Wu's great piece on Slate Magazine about his guidebook-free trip to Thailand. Tim only used traveller-built sites to guide him to the best spots for rock-climbing and, though he couldn't resist picking up a guide half-way through his experiences made for great reading. And it sparked a debate about where best to hammer our chocks into the lovely Thai limestone. I'd tell you where we settled on but we're still squabbling over it.
This got us all chatting, and we'd love to know what you think about using the web on the road, and your experiences of trying similar things. We're all big fans of what travellers can add to guides - the Thorn Tree and your letters and emails have been doing that for years, after all, and our Haystack accommodation booking service is but one place we'd love to get more of your views. How well do you think sites like this work, or could work out on the road?
What do you think?
Tom Hall
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4 Comments:
I am of the opinion that community contributed web-sites have a huge potential.
The reality of the current situation is that there are very few quality, reliable sources for travel information available on the internet. The sites that exist are generally overly commercial, in-accurate, hard to use, have little content or a just simply SPAM. Doing a google search for a hotel in italy yields nothing but spam site after spam site. Here lies a huge opportunity for LP.
My partner and I have been doing a reasonable amount of travelling recently and every time we go away I come up with a list of ideas on how to aggregate the mountains of travel information that exists.
The advantages that community based sites have are;
- Provided they are active, they are kept up to date
- They can adapt to cater for different niches, interests and groups
- They help tap a huge information bank that makes up the collective knowledge of the world
They also have disadvantages;
- They can be susceptible to in-accuracies especially if outside commercial interests are allowed
- They require time to build information and trust with their users
- They can be fragmented and incomplete if there are no guidelines or the site is poorly designed
At the same time, paid professional content is also extremely useful;
- It provides a starting point for conversation and development
- It can provide trustworthy, accurate information
- It can help fill in gaps where community generated content is insufficient or not yet developed
Whilst I am a big user of Lonely Planet guides and the Thorn Tree I believe that LP can make these services even better. There is a wealth of information available, but it is spread out in the numerous LP websites. It is often difficult to locate as there are many disjointed services. Integration of the various aspects of your site will help this and promote the different areas to newer visitors. By integrating community content with your professional content you can broaden your audience and fill gaps in each side.
I feel there is little point duplicating work done elsewhere (ie: wikipeida, wikitravel, flickr, primary information providers such as airlines, hotels, tourist sites), but the real challenge is making this information accessible and available.
With respect to providing information whilst on the road I believe that if you focus on content that is available in an open way technology will catch up and enable greater and greater access. For example, having a well designed web site allows people to access it from their computer, internet cafe, mobile phone, iPod, hard copy (printed) etc... In the short term you can look into ways to help promote this with the knowledge that things will only every become easier and easier.
I have other thoughts and ideas on how LP could turn into THE first point of call when researching for travel. Do not hesitate to ask if you are interested.
I think site's like Travelfish.org (the site that Wu ended up using for most of his trip) seem to find the correct middle ground. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone for the entire planet by using volunteers (the wiki/world66 model), Travelfish picked one part of the world, paid people to research it and overall covers it very well -- dare I say almost better than LP!
It's all well and good to have a community reviews online (my favorite general one that's useful for locals and travellers is Yelp.com), but unless there is some way to tease out the tastes of the reviewer (via profiles or links to their other reviews), it's hard to judge how much I can trust a particular review. So while many 18-year-olds may think that Full Moon Party on Ko Phanang is the best experience ever, I would probably disagree. That's an extreme example and a case where I can probably figure out what's really going on, but more subtle differences in taste/style/budget are what I look to the guides for.
Hmm... some element of social networking might be helpful. Like-minded travellers would be linked, so I can see whether a particular person and their friends have similar tastes to me, and read their reviews through that lens.
This is way late but as a lifetime fan of Lonely Planet -- particularly in my teenage years -- it was great to get this shout out.
Tim Wu
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