Practical Traveler: Crowd-Sourcing for Travel Advice
Ten years ago, a tip from my good friend Amy allowed me to experience Tulum well before the crowds arrived. And my husband’s former <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>supermarket coupons </strong></a> roommate Will, a finance executive who worked in Tokyo for a while, deserves credit for the best sushi dinner of my life. My friends, in turn, have followed the itineraries of several of my favorite vacations in places like Vieques, Hanoi and Holbox, an island off the Yucatán. It’s no surprise that travelers tend to trust the advice of people they know. Now, several new travel sites are trying to put those inclinations to use by allowing travelers to use social media sites for targeted trip advice. Take Gogobot.com and Afar.com, which both made their debuts last year. Each allows users to post specific questions about upcoming vacations to both Facebook friends and users of the sites: Where are the best family-friendly restaurants in Paris? Should we hire a personal driver to get around El Salvador? “It’s not who you know, it’s who you need to know,” said Derek Butcher, chief technology officer of Afar Media, which also publishes the two-year-old travel magazine Afar. Gtrot.com, which focuses on users’ immediate network of Facebook contacts, operates on the premise that 10 recommendations from friends you trust are better than 100 suggestions from people you don’t know. Planning a trip to Ecuador, I signed up with these three sites to see what kind of travel insights I could glean. For the most part, they offered advantages to simply posting a question on Facebook or Twitter. Below, an overview. AFAR.COM An interactive extension of the travel magazine with the same name, this social networking site offers personalized recommendations from travelers, locals who share your interests, and editors and writers at Afar. An initial travel personality quiz is designed to connect you with people with similar tastes. Based on my answers, I was dubbed an “active adventurer” who likes to get outside as much as possible, avoids tourist haunts and doesn’t mind roughing it a little. (Not too far off.) I then filled out a profile with a Facebook-like layout that allowed me to post previous trip highlights with photos <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>shop coupon </strong></a> and ask questions about my coming trip. The site sends your queries only to members who are familiar with the destination at issue. (You can also link your account to Facebook, which allows you to send the same question to your contacts there for more feedback.) By the next day, Jeremy <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>coupon savings </strong></a> Saum, an editor at the magazine, had posted a response to my questions about where to stay and eat in Quito, offering several ideas from an article that ran in the May issue, with some very specific tips. “Ask for the room on the first floor with the claw-foot bathtub,” he noted about Café Cultura, a Quito B-and-B. A nifty feature aggregates previous recommendations from members and automatically files them under a tab with the name of the city right above your question, allowing you to find extra tips easily. Bottom line: A clean, simple layout makes navigating this site a breeze. But while you get good personalized advice, it’s up to you to search out phones, addresses and other service information in order to put the advice to use. And like the magazine, the site seems to tend toward off-the-beaten-path destinations; if you’re looking for more-mainstream recommendations, Afar might not be your best resource. GOGOBOT.COM This trip-planning site also taps your social networks (Facebook and Twitter) for advice, but provides a few added layers. Unlike Afar, it will supply photos, phone numbers and addresses, if available, for the recommendations users make. It also includes tools to help you build a working itinerary that you can adjust as you go. I chose not to query my Facebook friends or Twitter followers, just to see what advice might surface from Gogobot users. Within a day, I received a response from a well-traveled member. It was only one response, but it included six insightful recommendations about where to go in Ecuador. “I’ve never been a big fan of touring old churches, but this one stands alone,” he wrote of one popular church. And his description of the Mitad del Mundo, a monument that marks the Equator, which I knew from past visits, was dead on: “The one and only reason to go here is for the novelty of taking your picture spread eagle across the Northern and Southern hemispheres.” (Turns out he is such an avid user of Gogobot that the company now pays him on a freelance basis to help cover <a href="http://www.htzh.net/view.php?id=140981"><strong>A Popular Choice to Wear Police Sunglasses | Fashion Sunglasses</strong></a> some of its more-obscure destinations.)
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