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Indie travel guides - pipe dream or way of the future?
With all due respect to my generous client Lonely Planet, without whom I'd still be an obscure, broke, moonshine junkie in a forlorn corner of Romania, guidebook authors wallowing below the Sushi Line are increasingly probing new "Screw the Man" applications for their hard-won expertise - namely their very own online travel guides.
There's certainly something to be said for a trusted brand name guidebook, but equally independently produced, digital travel guides allow authors to toss in all kinds of wacky content in addition to the usual sights/eating/sleeping content, uncorrupted by editors, guidelines, house styles and meddling lawyers.
A 2,000 word, absurdly detailed walking guide to Tijuana? Why not? A sidebar entitled "Top Ten Curse Words You Should Know Before Attending an Italian Football (Soccer) Match"? Bring it on! Why [insert your least favorite German city] sucks? I'm all ears.
This developing genre was recently augmented by the completion of Robert Reid's online guide to Vietnam. As Reid rightly points out, the advantages of an independent online travel guide are numerous:
• It's free - Guidebooks cost $25. Why pay?
• It's fresher. Unlike a guidebook, turn-around time is immediate.
• You can customize it. The most common complaint guidebook users have is having to tote around 400 pages they'll never use.
• It's more direct, personalized. With my site I can 'tell it like it is'.
• Anyone can talk with the author. [Just] hit 'contact'.
In addition to this excellent resource, other free sites serving the online travel community include Croatia Traveller, Kabul Caravan, Turkey Travel Planner, Broke-Ass Stewart's Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco, and (cough), the Romania and Moldova Travel Guide (now with extra moonshine).
For the time being, these independent travel guides are usually not money-making ventures (and boy do they take a lot of time to put together!), thus the current scarcity. However, as print media gasps to its inevitable conclusion – one decade, mark my words - the online stage is set for authors to leverage their expertise and provide autonomous, interactive, up-to-the-minute travel information for anyone with an internet connection.
Filed under: Afghanistan, Turkey, Vietnam, Croatia, Moldova, Romania
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Craig Nov 18th 2007 12:17AM
Don't forget the indispensable Matt Barrett's Greece Travel site -- http://www.greecetravel.com/ . Get past the unprofessional design and you'll see it's crammed with tons of information. I used it to plan my honeymoon and it was a fantastic resource, by far better than Lonely Planet et al. Everything he recommended that I tried out panned out very well.
Leif Nov 18th 2007 11:19AM
Hey Craig - Thanks for the lead. Great site indeed!
Oddsocks Nov 19th 2007 5:41PM
OutsidePrague is another that will be coming up soon (if I ever stop getting distracted by Gadling and the like and actually get the work done ;-)
Peter Kaplan Nov 21st 2007 3:01PM
Hi Leif,
Here is another one for you...
www.shaggyyak.com
this is not a website about shagging yaks, its an online intro to trave in Mongolia.
Leif Nov 21st 2007 4:15PM
Thanks Peter. I guess if Afghanistan has an independent online travel guide, why not Mongolia?
Good luck getting the Prague project going Oddsocks.
David Stanley Dec 5th 2007 2:21PM
"Guidebooks cost $25 while online guides are free." Fine, but what's the incentive for anyone to keep a website up to date if they don't get paid for their work? Sure, enthusiastic travelers can have a lot of fun posting their photos and travel tips online, but will they be prepared to go back and update their "guides" regularly every couple of months or years? If so, who will pay their travel expenses? Lonely Planet makes a lot of money selling hard copies of their guidebooks and they can easily afford to send writers for hire out to do the donkey work. How many webmasters will be willing to regularly update their hotel prices and restaurant listings the way established publishers do? The web is a wonderful resource but I don't think it will ever replace printed guidebooks. How can anyone leaving on an extensive trip foreign trip be stupid enough to go half blind just to save $25? Much of the information available for free on websites is anecdotal, incomplete, misleading, and out of date, or just paid advertising in disguise. There's a lot of stuff you can organize and check online but it's always great to have that printed guidebook on hand when you're alone in a strange place and really need it. I know because over the past 30 years I've written many travel guidebooks to the South Pacific, Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Cuba. My personal (and free) website http://www.southpacific.org is subsidized by sales of my books and online advertising. Without that income, I'd rather just go traveling for my own pleasure and not waste time sitting behind a screen.
Oddsocks Dec 12th 2007 8:56AM
What’s the incentive to keep a website up to date? The same as it is for a guidebook publisher, to keep the information relevant and useful to readers. Some people write for money, some because there’s a message they want to get across, and others for the sheer enjoyment of it (it’s a pretty good hobby; inexpensive, portable, potentially rewarding personally, socially and financially, little chance ofbroken bones). What they all have in common is that it’s pointless without readers. And a reader who finds what he/she is looking for is someone who will read your writing again. That’s the incentive.
The financial question you’ve answered yourself. Online advertising, book sales, image sales, affiliate income (Amazon & co). That’s assuming the writer hopes to achieve a financial gain at all from their website. Perhaps they’re just content that their hobby is less expensive than windsurfing, coin-collecting, or gambling?
“stupid enough to go half blind just to save $25? Much of the information available for free on websites is anecdotal, incomplete, misleading, and out of date, or just paid advertising in disguise.” Excuse me Sir but I think your prejudices are showing. Why does information online necessarily have to be inferior to that printed by guidebook companies-reputable or otherwise? Take a look at http://www.balkanology.com or even http://www.outsideprague.com and you might see that your assumption does not always hold true.
And have you noticed that guidebooks can also be out-of-date, incomplete and misleading? Especially out-of-date.
I do agree with you in part, though. It’s hard to foresee guidebooks ever being replaced by the web and you’re right - it is good to have a book in hand when you need it. Independent guide authors don’t seem to be trying to replace guidebooks though, do they? They’re invariably well-travelled people and no doubt aware that computers are heavy and that internet cafes sometimes close. Augment perhaps, but replace, no.
Then again, as a traveller, if you did have to make the choice between someone who’s writing selflessly and enthusiastically or someone who’s hacking away for the sake of a few bucks, who would you rather trust?
David Stanley Dec 12th 2007 3:02PM
Oddsocks, I looked at the sites you mentioned and http://www.balkanology.com/ is an attractive site but it doesn't seem to contain any specific hotel or restaurant listings. I also like the design of http://www.outsideprague.com/ but it's listings are very limited and I suspect they're all related to Outside Prague's owner in some way. Sites like this are great to peruse while you're planning a trip but they don't eliminate the need for a printed guidebook. I haven't seen one yet that does. Even Lonely Planet's famous Thorn Tree only provides many snippets of information - you still have to but the printed guidebook if you want to see the full picture. Of course, Lonely Planet planned it that way.
Oddsocks Dec 12th 2007 6:05PM
Poets Corner hostel in Olomouc is very closely related to Outside Prague's owner but that's it as far as I know, (and I'm in a fairly good position to know).
Great collection of articles you have linked from your author page on southpacific.org, by the way.
scribe Dec 12th 2007 7:13PM
A micro-brewery in Olomouc!! Just another reason to return.
Righto- enough time wasted and back to writing one of those old school guidebooks...
(Nice work on outsideprague)
Oddsocks Dec 14th 2007 7:42AM
Thanks Scribe. There are two microbreweries actually, but it's hard enough to get a seat in the non-smoking one as it is, so I'm holding off on the write-up for now ;-)