The internet has long offered online alternatives to the traditional printed travel guide, frequently with more current information and at least rudimentary customization capabilities. A new service from Technorati founder David Sifry, however, takes the concept a step further by tapping into the full wealth of information now available online with a professionally printed and ad-free personalized format that puts all the personally relevant parts in one place.
Now in beta, Offbeat Guides creates personalized, up-to-date travel guides to more than 30,000 travel destinations using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Users begin by inputting their destination, their departure location, their name and their dates of travel. Offbeat Guides' technology base of spiders and crawlers then goes out and finds the best information available on the internet—tapping such sites as Wikitravel, Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, AccuWeather, Google Maps and Eventful—and combines it with the most current information from a stable of established authors and thousands of locals. The preliminary result is a guide book of some 100 pages including local maps, festivals and events, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more. Users can then customize that initial report, deleting unnecessary chapters, for instance, or adding information such as their itinerary or recommendations from friends. Once they're satisfied, they can download their guide in PDF format for USD 9.95, or they can order a full-colour, 8.5-by-4.5-inch printed guide for USD 24.95.
Based in San Francisco, Offbeat Guides joins a space populated by competitors with similar—yet different—business models, including TripIt (which we've previously featured), Miss Information, Virtual Tourist and Nile Project, which is in beta too. We also can't help but think that sites like Blurb and Life Trackers could enable any travel-savvy minipreneur to produce similar bespoke guides of their own, tailored to each client's personality and plans. Time to launch a little travel-guide expedition....?
Website: www.offbeatguides.com
Contact: info@offbeatguides.com
Spotted by: Ruben Sage
Not quite the same as the personalised travel guide, but HSBC are launching personalised in-flight magazines. You select the columist you like and the sort of stories you like and it prints and binds in hardback for you. It's coming to Terminal 1 at Heathrow.
Spotted in today's Marketing Week.
http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/Home/Articles/f9e891ddebd44309b85315bf0727d3b7/HSBC's-in-flight-magazineputs-customers-in-charge.html
Sounds interesting -- thanks, Peter!
I am not sure, but is it not a Wikipedia condition to make all sampled content available under the same licence? So is there any copyight on the pdf books?
Thanks for mentioning us at NileGuide (www.nileguide.com). We believe we're unique in that we're the only consumer offering that includes full-suite trip planning functionality, including personalized recommendations, planning tools, UGC content, booking, and sharing tools, along with a customized guidebook. Plus, the guidebook is 100% unique to each traveler on a point of interest basis, so it's not just sections of existing guidebooks or publicly available data. It's really completely personalized to each user's itinerary.
I went to this site, I ordered a Guide from Havana (where I plan to go next holidays). Then I went to Wikitravel and compared the rsult with it and it is 100% a copy of the content and the photos... My questions:
- Where is the personalization? Every traveller to Havana will have the same guide.
Which is the deal? Why should I pay for something I can get for free in Internet? I just need to print it and that´s all.
Sure it's a good idea -- that's why at Travelfish (http://www.travelfish.org) we've been offering free personalised PDF guidebooks to Southeast Asian destinations since middle of 2004 (and paid-for ones since late '06). Having seen some of the Offbeat Guides to SE Asian destinations, they have an awful long way to go before they're putting something comprehensive together, but good luck to them.