tripadvisor

• Technorati founder Dave Sifry has launched his new Travel Guide startup, OffBeat Guides.
• He came up with the idea while visiting Dalian, China, one of my favorite places in the world. He was looking for a guidebook and was surprised to find limited info about Dalian, and an influx on major attractions like The Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors. He wanted to change this.
• Concept: Once  you to enter your name, travel plans, and where you are staying on OffBeatGuides.com, the system crawls various sites such as weather, professional travel sites, notes and articles by professional travel writers, etc. and displays essential guide book info about the area you are headed.
• The info is displayed in a Wikipedia style format and let’s you choose what kind of information you would like to include in your persona travel book (eat, sleep, attractions, dangers, etc.). If you know about the area already, then you can hide the history section, or if you already know what to see, you can hide the attractions section.
• Once you’ve built your book, you can download it as a PDF for $9.95 or purchase it in physical form for $24.95, which also includes the PDF. You can always refer back to it online need be.
• I don’t exactly know how Dave thinks he can compete in this arena. As an experienced world traveller, I can tell you that Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and more dominate the travel book industry. If I wanted to purchase one of those, I could do so online, buy it on Amazon used, or just pick one up when I go to my destination. Any non-westernized country will also have knock-off editions of all these travel guides that are around $5 once I get there. In addition, there are so many user generated travel resources out there, that I can print out myself if I wanted and make it into a nice little book. Wiki Travel guides, Bootnall Travel Network, Travel Blogs, Lonely Planet’s UG section, TripAdvisor, and so many more can give me this info for free. Come on, $24.95 for a printed version or $9.95 for a PDF? Sounds like you should have talked to a few more travellers before launching this thing.  I just don’t see the appeal here. Nice functionality and design, but I give it a 2 on execution. Sorry.

TC

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