Travelblather

Checking Maps - the Day by Day format is very map heavy. Every hotel, shop, restaurant and attraction is pinpointed on a map. There are 31 maps, with roughly 400 establishments marked on them. I could divide the city up into blocks and literally walk the streets ticking everywhere off. I reckon it will be quite a complicated task. I will need to cross check all the different chapters in the book as I walk down a particular street to tick off each shop, bar, hotel etc. Or else I could just call them all on the phone and check the details by phone - would that do? I do need to verify opening hours, credit card acceptance etc.

Adding New Places - I know there are several new hotels that are good that have opened and doubtless there will be new restaurants too. I will ask the Seville Tourist Board office, but they are not over-helpful. I will also ask the Seville Hotels and Restaurant Associations. Who else?

Revising the Layout - the Day By Day format is quite prescriptive. It's all about walking tours. I think it's highly unlikely that I will drop a tour and insert a different one in its place. But should I do something a bit more radical and make clear to my publisher I've made changes and show a potential purchaser that this is a new edition?

How long will it take? I reckon it was a good three months of research and writing to do the first edition - which ran to about 40,000 words. Plotting the places on maps was particularly time-consuming, but now that the maps are all done it should be quite quick to strike out places that have closed and add in new ones. I guess re-jigging the map keys will be a bit tedious. I hope to get the second edition done in 6 weeks quite possibly 4. I plan to spend at least 3, maybe 4 weeks on location. Do I need to spend that long there?

That's the sum total of my thinking so far. It would be brilliant if other guidebook gurus could share their thoughts about the best way to go about updating a guidebook.

I had a really interesting chat across the office with a couple of colleagues this afternoon. Both were bemoaning the fact that they are trying to get organised and book summer holidays for next year after leaving it to the last minute this year and not having very good experiences.

Neither of them had the first idea where to go to online to find inspiration.

As the resident travel 'expert' (their words not mine!) I was duly consulted about the ideal place for a really sunny beach holiday in Europe in mid-summer that would work well for kids and wouldn't be too resort-like and would be pretty cheap.

Simonseeks, vtravelled, travelmuse, thetraveleditor, tripbase, tripwolf - there are a good number of contenders for the content crown for travel holiday research, but the guys in my team (who work for a web and social media company!) hadn't heard of any of them. And frankly they wouldn't trust them if they did. And having tinkered with all of them I wouldn't either.

How about Trip Advisor? "No way... can't trust the reviews on there" I was told. One of my colleagues uses The Guardian's travel pages - he reads the Guardian on a regular basis and feels he can trust it. The other uses Flickr at the moment as her best research tool for holiday destinations. "At least that way you get a real idea of what a place looks like" she said.

I'm sure that the problem right now is that what sites there are out there online that are trying to provide inspiration for the research phase of booking a holiday are still way too general and way too new to be much use to anyone. Just to see I tried Travelmuse's inspiration tool. It suggested Lisbon, Nice and Naples as beach holidays for a family. Pretty hopeless. 

I'm doing some more detailed reviewing of research and inspiration tools which I'll share on another post soon.

In the meantime, the thing that we kept coming back to is Amazon's tool that tells you 'people who bought this book also liked....' There's some interesting discussion about the problems of creating a tool like this for travel on Stephen Joyce's excellent T4 blog. As he points out... it's just not that straight forward with an infrequent and complex purchase like travel:

'People who booked the Fairmont Vancouver also booked... 'another hotel in Vancouver'  - What do I need another hotel for!?

'People who booked a flight to Amsterdam also booked... a flight to Berlin' -
Yes, but I'm going to Amsterdam, so what's the use of that?

He has his own technical suggestions which you can read about on his post, but for me it's all about people like me.

Both the Travel Editor and vtravelled attempt to profile users to match them to other users or specific content, but for now neither has enough content or users to really make this work.

Now... if Trip Advisor could tell me not just which hotel was the most popular in a place, but which hotel was most popular amongst married, adventurous travellers with no kids yet who don't mind spending a bit for something genuinely different... (ie people like me!) THAT would be useful. Interestingly for Trip Advisor it's probably too late now... I doubt the demographic information the site holds for its many millions of reviewers is anymore detailed than what sex they are.

Where would you suggest for my colleague who wants a good value beach break that's hot and sunny in summer, couple of hours flying time, Ok for kids but not a huge beach resort? (I suggested Mallorca.)

Related link: Timesonline: Is the perfect travel website out there?
PIC:by Flickr user Dano

You have to admire Conde Nast - launching new magazines in the midst of a recession. So far I've been impressed with the UK version of Wired magazine launched a few months back. The August edition carried two almost contradictory features.

One was an extract from Chris
Anderson's much lauded recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price

"The web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100 per cent off." According to the reviews Anderson suggests that we've arrived at a new paradigm. Old models of price and value are being overturned.

Anderson is not saying everything will be free... more that we will value things in different ways. Whilst some things will be given
away, entrepreneurs will find new business models to make money in other ways. So a new band will give its music away for free as it will get pirated anyway. It will charge people to get a limited edition CD case, for tickets to a concert (which they will be keener to see having heard the music
already), a T-shirt etc. 

A few pages earlier in the magazine, a feature about Rupert Murdoch's plans to start charging for content online. Follow the link to read the full story but to summarise;

Evaporating print advertising means income in the newspaper segment of Murdoch's Newscorp empire has plummeted. Obviously Murdoch isn't happy about the way all that 'free' content on-line makes it necessary for him to make his on-line offerings free too. But guess what. Murdoch sees readers taking up the slack by subscribing. No clever new business models... just old school subscriptions. Why? Well, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has been quietly charging customers for access to some content since 1996. And:

- WSJ has around 90 per cent of the traffic it had before it started charging
"You don’t lose traffic when you charge, if you continue a rigorous effort to let people sample, let some content be free on any given day. You can keep up the same traffic, but your core readers – 10 per cent – will buy it so they never hit a paywall. So it’s not like you flip a switch and either you have [digital] ad revenue or circulation. WSJ has both."

- The cost of getting a print subscriber has gone down
"If you’re giving something away [online], it’s harder to get people to buy the print version. But if you attach a value to the online version then it’s easier to sell the print version and, most importantly, it’s much easier to sell the print version if you bundle the print subscription with an online subscription, which is what the WSJ and FT do."

So... will the on-line future be 'free'? I hope not.

Twitter and Facebook have yet to make any real money. And there are few examples of revolutionary methods of making money on-line. For most of the 'free' gang it's...  advertising... which isn't providing anywhere near enough income to run solid businesses. Yep. I'm on Murdoch's side. I don't believe all the smoke and mirrors.
Ultimately a business has to make money and I think age old business principles will still apply. I'm tired of the hidden
catches, the headline rates and amazing FREE deals that are
meaningless when you read the small print.

Indeed, its obession with 'FREE' means the internet encourages sleight of hand.

I HATE 'free'.

As consumers we need to wake up and realise that 'free' is rarely best. 'Free' usually means:

- You'll get hit for a charge somewhere else along the line
- You'll find the product isn't that great. If someone is giving something away for free, surely that means they can't convince anyone to pay for it?
- You won't appreciate it. Price defines something's worth in surprisingly subtle ways.

Maybe it's a bit generational. There's lots of talk of the current generation of students and schoolkids expecting stuff to be free. As if there's a quantum shift going on. But I'm not sure. (Maybe it's because at that age you have limited cash but plenty of time. So you can sift through the bum stuff and find the genuinely good stuff. As we get older we have more money but far less time. So we are prepared to pay for stuff to save time.)

Personally I don't want something 'free' with a hidden catch or that doesn't work all that well. I'd rather pay a nominal amount to use Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Gtalk and the rest and be sure it will work... all the time. Then I won't have to put up with stupid ads which get in the way and slow down the load times of pages. And if something goes wrong, someone will actually be motivated to fix it.

Wouldn't you?