Travel Tips

MONDAY, MARCH 21, 2005
Technology (A Special Report)
Notes From Nowhere: Travelers are going online to get the real skinny from those who have gone before
them

Reprinted from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BY VAUHINI VARA
IN MOST TRAVEL guides, Minot,
N.D., barely gets a mention.
But search for the little city on Wiki-
Travel.org -- an online travel guide written
by users of the site -- and advice
abounds. Among the sightseeing and
dining options: a strip mall called Town
and Country Center, and Schatz Econostop,
a 24-hour truck stop. ("Good food at
a very reasonable price," the Schatz
entry reads.)
For years, vacationers have relied
on guidebooks to plan trips. But because
of the high cost of printing, publishers
for the most part limit their books to the
most popular tourist attractions and
highly regarded restaurants in big cities
and other well-traveled areas. Now,
more and more globe-trotters are using
the Web to supplement traditional
guides with a wealth of useful tips and
recommendations from fellow travelers.
Many sites post accounts both of popular
spots and of more obscure destinations
from anyone who chooses to contribute.
Besides information you can't find in
a book, these sites offer constant
updates and a range of impressions that
can't be matched in print. "Sometimes,
you go to a place that's hyped up in a
guidebook and it ends up being disappointing,"
says Amy a 28-yearold
in , N.J., who visits
several sites for travel tips but spends
the most time at VirtualTourist.com,
owned by VirtualTourist.com Inc. of
Manhattan Beach, Calif. "It's nice to get
real opinions."
Traffic to most of the top sites dedicated
primarily to travel information (as
opposed to booking trips) is on the rise,
according to comScore Networks Inc., a
research and consulting firm based in
Reston, Va. TripAdvisor.com, the most
popular travel-information site,
attracted 5.5 million unique visitors in
January, up 19% from the year-earlier
month, comScore says. VirtualTourist.
com saw its traffic balloon to
993,000 unique visitors in January, up
61% from a year earlier, according to
comScore.
In addition to grass-roots sites like
WikiTravel.org, many of the bigger
names in travel are involved. The American
Society of Travel Agents in September
added a community section to its
Web site where users can share travel
tips with each other. Three months
later, the Expedia Inc. unit of New Yorkbased
IAC/InterActiveCorp launched a
feature on its Expedia.com travel site
that lets people browse fellow travelers'
rankings of hotels and restaurants.
Even leading guidebook publishers
have community sections on their Web
sites. The Thorn Tree forum, one of the
most popular travel forums on the Web,
appears on LonelyPlanet.com, the site
of Lonely Planet Publications of Melbourne,
Australia. "A guidebook will
never be 100% up to date," says David
McClymont, Thorn Tree manager, who
says the forum supplements the Lonely
Planet guidebooks.
"It's a low-cost way to really beef up
the content available," says Heather
Dougherty, senior retail and travel analyst
at Nielsen/NetRatings, a unit of
New York-based research and consulting
firm NetRatings Inc. She adds that
the growth of community travel sites
and sections reflects the increasing popularity
of "user- generated content"
throughout the Web, like reader reviews
on Amazon.com and seller ratings on
the eBay auction site.
Users of community travel sites
swap tips based on personal experience -
- like skipping the beach all the books
talk about in favor of a less populated
spot a few miles away.

Heather Griffin, a 29-year-old in Red
Bluff, Calif., posted a message on a site
called BootsnAll.com last year while
planning a three-month trip to a little
town in Mexico, where she planned to
learn Spanish. Within two days, five
people had e-mailed her with advice on
local beaches and attractions. She
recalls one member's advice: "Go to
Puerto Vallarta, but don't stay there
long." Instead, the person suggested
Sayulita, a fishing village north of the
tourist center. "It was very authentic,"
says Ms. Griffin, a graphic designer.
"We ate good tacos."
At BootsnAll.com, run by BootsnAll
Travel of Portland, Ore., there's plenty
of information available to anyone who
visits the site. But a free membership
allows you to communicate with other
members and publish articles on the
site, among other things. Jennifer Leo
found a personal tour guide -- and friend
-- through the site. When the Palo Alto,
Calif., resident recently took a trip to
Melbourne, a local member brought her
to all his favorite hangouts.
Amy came across VirtualTourist.
com two years ago while planning
a trip to Barcelona. The site features
albums kept by fellow "VTers," as
the site's members are known to each
other, filled with vacation photos, hotel
and restaurant recommendations, directions
to secret hideaways on remote
islands, and other insider tips. Now, she has her own following on VirtualTourist.
com: Her home page has
attracted more than 10,000 page views
since she created it last year. When she
planned a recent road trip to New Brunswick,
Canada, she enlisted the help of
VTers who lived along the way to point
out shortcuts and back roads.
TripAdvisor.com was established in
2000 when one of its founders, Stephen
Kaufer, became frustrated with the
extraneous search results he had to
wade through while using traditional
search engines to plan a trip to Mexico.
He and his co-founders decided to create
a one-stop site that gathered news
items, guidebook suggestions and special
deals in one place. As an afterthought,
they also included a userreview
section.
P R E V I E W
"The irony is that now we're known
for the user reviews," says Langley
Steinert, chairman and co-founder of the
site, which is now owned by
IAC/InterActiveCorp.
Sometimes the reviews can turn into
heated debates, like one that has broken
out on the TripAdvisor review section
for the Inn at Ormsby Hill, a bed and
breakfast in Manchester, Vt. One group
praises the inn for its tasty breakfasts,
antique furnishings and elegant atmosphere,
while others complain about the
strict rules: Putting a glass on a table
without a coaster earned one guest a
slap on the wrist, according to a posting
on the site. "An inn?" one critic wrote.
"More like a boarding school!"
Ormsby Hill innkeeper Chris
Sprague says she has heard about the
debate from customers, but she insists
she has never been tempted to take a
peek, even though the site lets businesses
post rebuttals to negative comments.
"I'm so backwards in the computer
department," says Ms. Sprague, who
runs the inn with her husband. "We
chose to rise above it, and just let it play
itself out."
While she has declined to respond to
the criticism on the site, Ms. Sprague
suggests it doesn't reflect the feelings of
most of her guests. "Every once in a
while, you might have a guest who for
some reason is just not a happy person,"
she says. "I can tell you that we have a
heck of a lot of happy guests."
Mr. Steinert says some of the opinions
on his site indeed make many business
owners cringe, but he believes they
can also learn from the reviews.

Meanwhile, some sites are trying to
take the concept of user- generated content
a step further than forums and
reviews -- with mixed results.
WikiTravel.org is one of these sites,
which give users near-total control over
content. Michele Ann Jenkins, the 28-
year-old co-founder of WikiTravel.org,
traveled to Thailand with her boyfriend,
Evan Prodromou, two years ago. They
reached a remote island late in the evening
and checked their guidebook to find
a place to stay for the night. Its advice:
Walk around the pier and follow the
beach, and you'll reach a bungalow-style
hotel with an ocean view. "We came around the corner with
our backpacks on, exhausted, and there
was no hotel," she says. The most frustrating
part, she says, was that she had
no way to warn other readers of the
guidebook that the entry was outdated.
Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Prodromou,
now married, were active contributors
to wikis -- Web sites that anyone can edit
or add to. When they returned home to
Montreal, they had an idea: Why not
create a travel wiki where travelers can
change and update the entries themselves?
The result: More than 3,300
pages that read like official guidebook
entries but are constantly under revision
by thousands of readers.
"The more remote you get, the less
likely they're going to get someone out
there often," Ms. Jenkins says of standard
travel guides. "And those are the
places that change the most often, too."
Ms. Jenkins says mistakes on Wiki-
Travel.org are usually revised within
hours by the site's users, though sometimes
it can take up to a week on less
well-read pages.
But opening a site up for public editing
can also open the door to sticky situations
-- like a doctored photograph of
Yasser Arafat in lingerie that once
appeared on the Palestine page on a
similar wiki travel site, World66.com,
run by World66.com BV of the Netherlands.
A few days -- and a handful of
angry e-mails -- later, the site's management
removed the photo and placed a
stern message on the page forbidding
offensive material.
One fan of community travel sites is
Kathy Sudeikis, president and chief
executive of the American Society of
Travel Agents in Alexandria, Va. "Oh
my gosh, we all use TripAdvisor," she
says. She often browses the site to learn
more about hotels in obscure locations,
and encourages her clients to use it for
their own research.
Rick Steves, author of a best-selling
series of travel guides for Europe, found
a soapbox on the Web after his guidebook
to Russia and the Baltics went out
of print in the late 1990s. "It just didn't
sell," he says. "But it's great material, so
we have it on the Web site."
Now, RickSteves.com also includes
a section with updates and revisions to
the author's guidebooks, published by
Europe Through the Back Door, of
Edmonds, Wash. And there is a forum
on the site for users' contributions. But
Mr. Steves says there is still a market
for guidebooks: Sometimes, he suggests,
it's easier to let someone else
wade through -- and package -- the
research for you: "I just can't see somebody
going to Paris with a bushel of
printouts" in place of a guidebook, he
says.
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