Other people’s travel tips
Are you already planning your summer holidays or are you abroad on business often? Then you may want to find out what others have to say: they can point to the nicest places and the best restaurants.
On your smartphone
The Web is crawling with travel guides and tourist information, but these sites often serve commercial purposes only. Fortunately, there are online initiatives presenting information straight from other travellers. If you have a smartphone, Foursquare (http://www.foursquare.com) may prove useful. It’s a free application for your iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, Android or other portable device. It provides tips from your friends, colleagues or business partners about, for instance, restaurants, museums or shops within a limited radius of your present location. Of course, the idea is that you should also share your own experiences with others. Foursquare is a good initiative, but it has one major restriction: the application detects your location and provides information only in the immediate vicinity on the basis of the location it has detected. In other words, it’s impossible to check beforehand what’s on in, say, Montmartre in Paris when you’re still in London.
Fourwhere
Fortunately, there’s Fourwhere (http://www.fourwhere.com), a website combining Foursquare and Google Maps. This site lets you read all the comments and tips users make about the places they visit, and you don’t even need to be a Foursquare user to read them. Conveniently, you can obtain information about any place, without actually having to be there. Just enter the desired location in the search field. As soon as the map has loaded, click on it and select the Find all comments around here option. Orange bubbles point to interesting locations, and when you click on them the accompanying comments are shown in the right-hand column. Our “Montmartre Paris” test produced a lot of comments and tips, but their quality obviously varied greatly. In most cases, they involved culinary experiences. Tip. You don’t need to confine yourself to one single location: when you again select the “Find all comments around here” option somewhere else on the map, you will see a new load of tips. In this way you can compile your own travel guide. Note. If everything becomes a bit too messy, you can start from scratch by clicking on Clear all. Our final verdict: Fourwhere is a potentially useful source of information but it needs expanding.
Other sources
Besides these “mobile” solutions, there are the familiar guides bundling the experiences of travellers all over the world. IgoUgo (http://www.igougo.com) collects travel reports on 9,000 destinations, and Virtual Tourist (http://www.virtualtourist.com) is even more comprehensive. This site bundles 1.7 million experiences about 73,000 different locations. You can look up your destination via Travel Guides (a thematic index) or using the search field at the top. Conveniently, each destination comes with a structured menu including nightlife, restaurants, transportation, shopping, etc. Tip. Also check out the useful Tourist Traps section!
With more than 30 million reviews, TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk) is even larger than Virtual Tourist. The reviews again cover a wide range of aspects (restaurants, things to do, etc.), but we would have preferred a few more sections. Still, this website is a treasure-trove of information, even to the extent that the gigantic number of travel reviews and opinions sometimes makes it hard to find your way here.
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