The last six months, I’ve read about a number of internet start-ups that offer a personalized travel “books” service.
This is how it works for most websites: You choose a destination, a date of arrival and departure, and the system starts “crawling” the internet for data from interesting data. You can delete chapters, and create a customized PDF travel guide for US$9.95 (or a hard copy for US$ 24.95). A few websites that offer services like this: Tripwolf, Tripit, and NileGuide
OffbeatGuides.com, one of the newest kids on the personalized travel guide block offers a choice of 30,000 destinations! Eat that, Lonely Planet (and Spotted by Locals ;) )!
Of course I did a test-run, to try it out. I created a travel guide for Zagreb (Croatia) and Amsterdam (Netherlands), for an imaginary 4 day trip in December.
It resulted in a 18 page cityguide for Zagreb, and a 54 page cityguide for Amsterdam.
My conclusion: an Offbeat travel guide would not be worth US$9.95 to me at this moment. But is sure is an interesting phenomenon for the future…
The downsides I experienced:
- I could have made this travel guide myself very easily. Both travelguides were compiled out of almost solely very general Wikpedia and Wiki Travel information. World Travel guide even offers a free service for this;
- Both travel guides just contained way too little interesting information. Most of the (very few) restaurants found in Zagreb only contained an address, and no description.
What’s cool and promising?
- The system is very easy to work with, and it the result looks suprisingly good for a machine putting together some information from various sources without any human interference;
- Web-crawlers, that search the internet for interesting information, are getting smarter and smarter. When content sources other than Wikpedia and Wiki Travel get tapped into (e.g. our content!), the content could get much more interesting;
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