Using the Internet as Your Guidebook

Jackie Binion | 16 April 2007 |

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Many a traveler has purchased a ticket, packed and boarded a plane with only a travel guide in hand ready to see the world. These days, the internet makes it easier to plan a vacation through the numerous travel review sites and volumes of information available at our fingertips. Tim Wu, who writes at Slate.com, tested the reliability of internet review sites for a recent trip to Thailand.

Now I must admit, this was a pretty adventurous move by most people’s standards. This guy was prepped to board a plane without consulting the guidebooks and only using the Wikitravel site to plan his trip. Wikitravel is a user-generated content site that attemps to stay neutral with the information it sets forth for readers. The main goal of the site is to allow almost anyone to be a travel writer and share their experiences with the internet generation.

The bottom line of this experiment was that Wikitravel is a great place to start the research. Listings are general and the editors try to keep most of the opinion from seeping out. You’ll want to use it as your travel planning GUIDE to research over 14,000 different locations and read reviews from other travelers.

The internet led Wu to TravelFish.org, another travel review site that encourages volunteer feedback on locations. It gives users the opportunity to say whether or not a destination is worthwhile. This site was far more useful in planning than with accommodation listings written by paid associates, yet also includes feedback from readers with comments like “Sorry, you guys were wrong.”

Although this trip was an experiment, Wu found that some travel review sites have not come as far along in the past few years as hoped and that maybe it’s not time to forget the guidebooks. Give these types of sites a little bit longer, and I bet they will be everything the Fodor’s, and Let’s Go books are. This is not to say that you should not use these types of sites, but having a reputation online entails having some general listings too. That’s really what you should expect from these sites as they develop.

Jacqueline Binion - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.