web sites: RealTravel.com, Yahoo! Travel’s Trip Planner
While I love planning travel to unfamiliar areas, it can be time-consuming and intense if you let it be. There is an overwhelming amount of information to input from a variety of sources: magazines, travel guides (of various flavors), internet articles, forums, user-generated content, tv shows, friends and family. Being the organizational soul that I am, I’m always looking for new and improved ways to collect and digest that information into an itinerary-building, travel-ready form. I thought I would use the opportunity of my upcoming vacation to put a few popular travel planning sites to the test.
The sites: RealTravel.com and Yahoo! Travel’s Trip Planner
Test #1: design a walking tour for a day in Paris
Test #2: find a hotel near the vineyards in Burgundy
RealTravel.com
On their main page, RealTravel claims that they are “the travel guide and trip planner powered by advice from real travelers”. That in itself seems a little off. How exactly is the “trip planner” powered by advice? Much like that statement, the “trip planner” on RealTravel comes off as a bit of an after thought.
The interface is nice and engaging, more directed towards those still uncertain about their final destination. Finding the destination I was looking for (let’s try Paris first) was a little confusing. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get to a list form of cities, much like I am used to from the likes of your Frommers.com and Fodors.com. While the site seems to be highly robust (full of restaurants, hotels, etc.), in truth the content is almost completely based from blog entries from travelers. In an effort to find a walking tour for Paris, I am lead to this post, a blog entry that had been user-tagged “walking tour”. Compared to the quality a walking tour from Frommers, the user-generated content is somewhat lacking. There is no bullet point breakdown of the stops on the tour, let a alone an estimated time. Hoping to find more of what I was looking for in “itineraries,” I disappointed to discover that a so called “itinerary” is just a table of contents of a travel blog that is somewhat poorly mashed up with a map.
With such a poor experience finding a simple Parisian walking tour, I had little hope for my Burgundy hunt. Finding a not-so-popular destination is almost impossible beyond using the search box. Hotels in “Burgundy” aren’t able to feed in hotels from Dijon and Beaune, two of the biggest cities in the region. So I basically have to know I’m interested in staying in Beaune in order to find a hotel in Beaune via this route.
Another not so fun thing… blogs are completely disconnected from information about the points of interest mentioned in them. So I have no way of clicking on a restaurant mentioned in a blog to read reviews, contact information, etc. The so-called “trip planner” is nothing more than glorified bookmarking. But, if you are looking for a site that makes exploring travel blogs and building your own simple and engaging, then RealTravel is a great resource.
Yahoo! Travel’s Trip Planner
It’s too bad that RealTravel has begun aligning itself (albeit loosely) with Frommers. Upon exploring Yahoo’s Trip Planner, I felt that it turned out to be a useful trip organizing tool that was lacking in the depth and quality of information (is there really nothing to do in Beaune?) that is contained in a travel guide site. And while what it has for big cities is pretty impressive, it lacks the useful navigation and editorial content that contextualizes the big lists of “things to do”, such as Paris in 5 days or Neighborhoods in Brief. In a few years, I’m sure Yahoo! will either buy out a resource or will have worked to collect its own information. But until that point, Yahoo’s Trip Planner is a more useful way to end the planning process, but not necessarily act as the exclusive place to begin it.
Since “trips” are also just glorified travel blogs on Yahoo!, in order to start I must choose to “Create A Trip”. Picking cities is easy and fun, and as soon as I start building a trip, Yahoo! starts to throw out suggestions for me (”What other people are doing in Lyon”). Navigating could use some improvement, as I’m constantly bounced in and out of Yahoo! Travel vs Trip Planner, and I find it difficult to read about other’s trips while viewing my own. Nevertheless, the site offers multiple ways for me to explore things of interest and at every point there is a big green plus symbol to “add to my trip”. Unlike RealTravel, adding a destination to my trip actually puts it into a useful itinerary building application, complete with Yahoo! maps mashup. And while Yahoo! doesn’t offer me a way to find a “walking tour” in Paris, it’s only a matter of time before commercial sponsors start submitting their own useful itineraries for those areas that are lacking. As for Test #2, I had to add “Marche aux Vins” to the Yahoo! database (just one of handful of things to do in Beaune) in order to find a hotel nearby, at which point the integration with Yahoo! maps comes in very handy.
Finally, Yahoo! succeeds in ways that I wasn’t really expecting from my travel planning resource. As I add areas of interest to my trip, they are clearly noted by color differentiation on the map. Points of interest are orange, points in my trip for consideration are blue, and points I’ve “scheduled” to attend are in green. It really gives you a perspective on what “must do” items are near “might do” items, or what hotels you were thinking of booking are off in the middle of nowhere. So despite it’s navigational faults, Yahoo! has actually created a useful tool. Now if I can only get it to factor in budget, print out pocket-sized maps, or better yet download my trip into an application for my mobile device.
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