Travelblather

Welcome the very excellent Tamsin Bishton-Hemingray - previously Head of Content at iCrossing and all round super-experienced web content person. I can't recommend her highly enough if you're looking for help with content or content strategy.

I've been badgering her to write me something for Travelblather... and now, here it is!

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This summer I spent a wonderful week inter-railing around Italy with my family. We spent 36 hours in Venice, a couple of days in Rome and a couple on the coast in the Cinque Terra national park. As well as being a fantastic holiday, it also gave me the opportunity to try out a travel app on my HTC Android phone, which being a content geek was quite exciting to me. I was really disappointed by the experience. This blog post explains why, and why I think that travel publishers have got to work a lot harder on their apps before they are going to put good, old-fashioned guidebooks out of business.

Planning the trip
Planning this holiday required some forethought. There were a lot of things that we wanted to do and see in Venice and Rome, and only limited time to do and see them all in. We sorted out our accommodation online ahead of time using a combination of TripAdvisor recommendations for Venice and Rome, and a superbly useful B&B website which uses a searchable Google map to help you find a B&B exactly where you want one – in my case the tiny village of Manarola.

Then we turned our thoughts to planning our holiday activities. Despite both being web-savvy types, we headed straight to the book shop – because in our experience online travel content of this kind is still poorly lacking.

Guidebooks, ebooks, maps or apps?
We went to the lovely Waterstones in Brighton and sat down in the travel section to work out what we needed. My husband had youthful brand loyalties to Lonely Planet while I had fond memories of a week in Paris when I was 18 with the Rough Guide as my companion - so we knew we wanted a guide book. But should we buy one each for Venice and Rome, or just buy one for the whole of Italy?

As we browsed the bookshelves we also searched the Android Marketplace for apps. These were much cheaper than the printed guidebooks.  But we wanted to balance cost with having enough detail to help us get the best out of our holiday.

And then there were maps. We definitely needed a good map of Venice, and one of Rome.

In the end we bought the following:
Rome Compass (Lonely Planet app) – 49p
The Rough Guide to Italy (10^th edition, March 2011) - £15.99
Pocket Rough Guide to Venice (Including large map) written and researched by Jonathan Buckley - £7.99

We were relying on the app to be our map in Rome, and the pull-out large scale map in the Venice guidebook to help us there.

How good were our guides?

App: Lonely Planet Rome Compass
I downloaded this app for 49p while we were still browsing in Waterstones because it was published by Lonely Planet. In fact, it was the only relevant app that I could find on the Android Marketplace from a publisher I trusted.  I was surprised how important this issue of trust was. My phone is an important tool – and I felt nervous about downloading an app from a publisher  I didn’t know. I felt even more nervous about giving my credit card details to them. So I rejected unknown publishers immediately.

I was excited by the Rome app because the blurb said you could use your phone’s camera function to display an “augmented reality” map giving you directions to the places you wanted to go to in Rome, a bit like a SatNav display from your phone. As I fired it up in Waterstones, I realised that, durrr, I was going to have to wait until I was in Rome itself to see how this actually worked from a usability point of view! There was also static content in short guidebook-style sections – Eat, Drink, Sleep etc. But the content in here wasn’t very detailed and didn’t provide indications of things like price range – something that was a critical factor for us. We were holidaying on a budget.  And it was also clunky to search for things and there didn’t seem to be a way to search by location or type of restaurant without using the map function.

So before I even got to Rome I was feeling a bit nervous about using this app.

Once there, things got worse. I had been receiving regular text messages from my provider (Vodafone) about my data usage reminding me that I had a “passport” and so would pay a fixed fee for a certain amount of data usage – but then an astronomical amount per MB once I passed my limit. It meant that I got worried about using data services on my phone. And without data services, the app was next to useless. On the couple of occasions I turned it on, it was so slow to load that my husband had already found what we needed to know in our print edition Rough Guide To Italy.

After our first afternoon of failing to find our way around with the app, I switched it off. We got a great map from the reception of our B&B – complete with the receptionist’s recommendations on how to get to the major sites, and we used the Rough Guide for everything else.

In short, the app was crap. This was partly because it was so hard to search for stuff, and partly because with roaming costs for mobiles still so high, I was just too worried about my mobile bill to use it.

Lonely Planet need to give users a clear indication of the amount of data the app is likely to use. They also need to add content and make it much more easy to search and bookmark for future reference. For me one of the advantages of a digital guidebook should be that I can carry around lots and lots of information without having to carry around a weighty book. Having less detail than the print version just doesn’t make sense.

Rough Guide to Italy
This rocked in comparison to the app. Easy to find stuff (just use the index), quick to flick through, simple to bookmark (just fold the corner), fun to browse in more detail on train journeys (no batteries or mobile signal required), jam-packed with reliable and important detail, it absolutely trounced the app. We used it for Venice, Rome and Cinque Terre and also had fun reading up about the parts of Italy that we just glanced fleetingly through the window of our train. Yes it was 30 times more expensive than the app, but it was worth every penny.

But – as with my previous experiences of Rough Guides – the small maps included alongside the fantastic detail were consistently pretty useless and often completely wrong. We would have got lost many times if we had relied on them. So it wasn’t completely perfect.

Pocket Rough Guide to Venice
We bought this because of the pull out map, and because we were worried the Rough Guide To Italy wouldn’t have enough detail. Actually, we could have lived without it. And the pull out map was a little bit inaccurate when it came to locating recommended cafes and gelateria. The best map we found to Venice was (like the one used in Rome) the one that was provided to us by our fabulous B&B; it was clear, easy to understand, accurate and free. We brought one home with us to use next time we visit Venice.

So what?
As a content geek, I’ve been reading for years now about how mobile phones are becoming our favourite way to access content of all types. I was really excited about the idea of an app that would fuse Google Maps data and guidebook content into a new format right there in the palm of my hand. But practicalities got in the way. There are a few people who will take their phones on holiday with them and not worry about the cost of use. But there are a lot more people like me who really worry about that expenditure. I might just take the risk if the content in the app was more detailed, more up to date and easier to access. But it wasn’t.  There was less detail than the guidebook. And on top of that, you just can’t flick through an app the way you can flick through a book. These are both critical flaws in my opinion.

For me, the bottom line is that the new medium isn’t enough. The content and the experience have to be top notch too. Based on the Compass experience, I think travel apps still have a way to go.

How does the way we interact with print media and the internet differ? That’s something I’ve been considering lately. Traditional publishers currently populate most of their web real estate with content from their print editions.

Traditional wisdom has it that people ‘sit back’ to read and to watch TV, but they ‘sit forward’ when they are online. They are more engaged, typing queries into a search engine, clicking on stuff. If we are talking about the travel sector as an example, they're probably looking for deals or specific types of information rather than wanting to be spirited away to an exotic destination with poetic prose and beautiful imagery.

Following this logic, people often suggest that online content should be shorter, more to the point and more targeted at converting people to purchase than content in print tends to be. Print is a more reflective medium and it’s bigger, so better suited to inspiration and richer description. So you need to take a different approach with your online content and at the least rework stuff created for print quite aggressively before publishing on the net.

As a result, as little as a year or so ago I’d have advocated quite different approaches to creating content for web and for print. I’d have said that simply sticking print edition content online wasn’t likely to work for your business model or your reader/customer. The way people interact with them is just too different.

But I’m not so sure anymore.

I always felt the iPad was a bit of a product extension for the iPhone – “Hey! Why don’t we just make it, like… bigger!” But increasingly I think of all the remarkable products the late Steve Jobs’ will forever be associated with, it’s this one that will be the game- changer. Many of my techno-fan mates who bought an iPad did so I think because it was ‘the next new toy from Apple’. But it’s changing the way we interact with the net - massively. It’s turning the net into a ‘sit back’ medium. The ease of touchscreen interaction – which for the small screen iPhone just felt like an essential just to make it useable - becomes incredibly potent with a larger screen. It makes online content suddenly a much more browseable thing. The ramifications could be huge.

Maybe we need to start thinking about online travel content as being as much about inspiration and reflection as it is about hard detail and conversion. What that actually means right now, I’m not really sure.

What do you think?

Lovely pic by Flickr user: aperturismo

A genuinely funny story has been getting a good number of retweets of late. It's a write up by James Gritt of Vice magazine. Basically he slams the place - and he does it with some genuinely funny irony too.

"Usually you go to these places and it’s impossible to find something that isn’t penis-shaped, so it was a relief to find this understated little trinket to take home to my grandparents" - alongside a badge with the slogan 'Show us yer piss flaps' on it for example!

Be warned before you read PR Holiday - We went on a foam party to Magaluf that there are graphic pictures of people shagging on the beach, drunken half naked girls at a foam party and more. (I bet I get more clicks from this link than any other on my blog... and that kind of says it all...)

It's being hailed as a PR fail of epic proportions. And you can see why - James clearly hated the place. Or at least that's the impression you take away from his piece.

But I'm not so sure.

Magaluf is what it is. It's sleazy, it's drunken, it's hell on earth for some holiday makers. But for everyone? And specifically for the kids who read Vice? You could argue that the PR guy got his demographic targetting just right. Vice magazine has attracted some very high profile backers and it's seen as one of a handful of publications that has real engagement with the teen/young adult market. It's a really impressive product. The print version used to be available in Brighton and I've read several issues.

James does a great job - he doesn't condone this kind of stuff and, actually, that's the clever bit. If he'd written a 'phwwoar get pissed in Magaluf ' kind of post, he'd have had a stream of 'how could you... this is disgusting' comments under his post and probably far fewer tweets and retweets. Conversely, if he'd tried to make out that Magaluf was some kind of family-friendly sophisticated beach resort - that would have been doing his readers a huge disservice. It's an honest write-up. And if you look at other posts on the Vice website you see that it's totally what you'd expect - Amsterdam Squat Riot! is another recent post.

Read the comments below the post and you see plenty saying 'ugh!'... and a good few saying 'I'm booking a trip there right now!'

I wonder if James put his camera back in his room and then went back out to join in the mayhem once he'd got his shots for the piece?

And... Is the PR exec who arranged the trip packing their desk into a box or cracking the champagne right now?

What do you think?

Pic credit: James Gritt/Vice magazine

I have blogged on this topic before but it was back in 2009 and I feel it needs re-visiting. The whole web feels built on the premise that stuff should be free. And if you subscribe to Chris Anderson's view this is a wonderfulworld where it can only get better.

Would you pay to use Facebook? Pay to use Hotmail? Pay to use Twitter? Even pay to search using Google? For a lot of people that idea seems ridiculous. But think back a decade or so and the idea of stuff just being given away free would have seemed equally crazy too. I don't know how we got here. Most people would say it's a pretty great thing. But in many ways I don't like it.

Free in my opinion sucks.

Free means customer service often isn't up to much
So if your Facebook account falls over or your Hotmail stops working, what do you do? Whinge on twitter about it? Struggle with posting the info on a forum and hope someone will help? More likely cross your fingers and wait for it to get fixed. If you were  to pay say $10 a month or whatever, there'd be an immediate loss of revenue if you quit due to the problem and if you told all your mates about it and they started to quit too it would hurt the company's bottom line. You'd have protection under consumer law I'd imagine too. You paid for a service, the provider has an obligation to provide it. If it's free. Well, tough.

Free means you're a guinea pig
The 'forever Beta' disease could be another way to describe this. We never get a finished product. It's always being tested, mucked around with, changed. Just as you thought you knew how to manage your privacy settings on Facebook - whoops they all changed again. I really hate this 'fail fast' crap. It's an excuse for launching tons of junk and hoping some of it sticks. Google in particular does this so much. Remember Wave? Ever even heard of Hotpot? Blah.

Free means it could all get taken away from you
It was delicous a month or two back. The rumours were that Yahoo would sell its smart little web-based bookmarking gizmo and who knew what might happen then. UK readers - do you remember Friendsreunited? Or how about Freeserve? If you're lucky, when the business goes down or runs out of cash it will get picked up again by someone else with deep pockets - which is ultimately what happened with Delicious, thank goodness.

Free means the company you are dealing with is dumb
Of course it's quite easy to get loads of people to try stuff out if it's free. It's crap - but so what, it's free. You can't expect too much from something free now, can you? How did we get to a situation where it was seen as cool to just launch something and have no idea how you'd make money from it? No wonder the financial system went into meltdown a while back if investors were happy to pony up cash for no reason other than 'quite a few people like us'. Dumb.

Free means you will end up paying anyway
The 'fremium model'. What a load of bunk. You get a bit of something in the hope you will then trade up and pay for the real deal. A good example - I've been looking at apps for the iPhone. There are lots of free apps to places - they seem to offer much the same as the ones you pay for. Except you then discover that you've only downloaded an app with next to nothing in it. You have to pay to get the full version. And it constantly bugs you with pop-ups to do so.

Free makes it hard to choose
If you're in the market for say a hotel room in Seville you can make your choice based on cost among other things. You have a budget of around 100 dollars for a night you can immediately discount say 80% of the hotels because they are much more or much less. If everywhere was free - how would you work out which was right for you? You could certainly do it, but it would take much much longer. Price is a valuable yardstick for helping us choose. Right now how do you decide which webmail service to use? Yahoo? Google? Hotmail? I don't know either. And which social platform? Twitter? Facebook? Google +?

Free means they make the rules
Facebook has privacy settings set to 'on' for everything. Do people want that? Seriously? MSN publishes lots of free content - but you have to wade through pages to read it because they need to hang as many ads on as many pages as possible. It's the most hopeless reading experience imaginable. Your data and habits are being quietly mined by companies like Google and Facebook and the powers that be have been cowed into accepting that that's OK because the products you are using are being given to you free. Check out this fascinating piece about Google and the way it makes the rules to ensure it makes money whilst giving the impression its impartial.

Free means the product could suck
In a market where a big corporation with buckets of cash gives things away for free it squashes competition. Free is anti-competitive. There could be thousands of brilliant Facebook-like Social Media platforms, Search Engines, Webmail products and more out there, but we won't ever get to see them because the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook give their products away for free so new entrants find it virtually impossible to compete and stay in business. And free content often conforms to this rule. How much spammy crap content clogs up your search results on a daily basis? It looks great in the search results, but click on the link and you find it's a load of waffle.

Free means someone is working for peanuts
This isn't always the case, but often for start-ups trying to compete in the web space (where big corporations are squashing competition by giving stuff away for free) the only thing to do to try and compete is to try and do stuff at virtually no cost too. The number of times I have been approached to write stuff for free or give away my back catalogue for free to new content websites on the vague hope that I might one day make some money from ad revenue or whatever. I just tell people politely that I don't work for free, but doubtless a lot of people trying to get a foothold on the ladder are prepared to do this. My experience is that if you start writing for nothing, peanuts is all you will ever get paid.

What do you think? Ever wished you could pay for something but have to accept a poor quality free thing instead because the market can't provide anything else?

I've been trying to book a holiday - yes, a holiday!  For me, my long suffering wife who has been holding the fort whilst I've been galavanting around Africa researching for travel features, and for our 8 month old baby.

We just want to lie in the sun and do nothing for a week. We don't have a stack of cash to spend, but we could spare a couple of grand I guess (for everything). But we absolutely don't want to be in an all-you-can-eat-buffet place with aqua-gym in the mornings and karoake at night.

Who to go with? I haven't a clue.

Previously as a relatively adventurous traveller without a baby in tow I'd have plonked for a tour co like Exodus or Explore if I'd wanted my hand held a little but a frisson of adventure at good value. If it were me and the wife doing something a bit more relaxed, I'd have probably considered Inntravel who do lots of nice self-guided walking and cycling breaks in Europe and elsewhere. If Joseph were older I'd take the family on an Activities Abroad break - I think they offer great value holidays for adventurous families.

But a package holiday for a young family without the awfulness of packages? A package holiday for the Waitrose shopper rather than the Asda one?

I have no idea.

Who would you travel with and why? And am I right in thinking this is a niche that the market fails to cater at all well for?

Pic by flickr user Hans Pama