17 October,2010 09:54 AM IST | | Lindsay Pereira
Feel like making your own travel guide? It's an interesting premise, at least for travellers who intend to do something more adventurous than booking a group tour and sitting in a bus clicking photographs. Stay.com is a model waiting to be emulated in India -- and emulated well, I might emphasise -- because it does the job our myriad departments of tourism ought to have perfected years ago, but may not if the CWG is any indicator.
Stay.com lets you build customised, free guides highlighting places you plan to visit, and then share those plans (via your preferred social media platform) with fellow travellers. You can add data on a museum (or restaurant) you fancy, pull elements from other user guides, and get the kind of recommendations not necessarily mentioned in official guidebooks. It also lets you download PDF versions. Currently covering 50 cities, the list is growing.
What I like best is how it also integrates content from sites like TripAdvisor and OpenTable. Add mobile integration, video guides and geo-location features, and you are looking at the kind of platform you wish you had logged on to before your last vacation.
Like most things online, there are a number of other players in this space. Like OffbeatGuides (.com), which lets you build personalised travel updates in five steps, then have it shipped to your inbox as a PDF file or to your mailbox as a book. YourTour (.com), TripIt (.com) and NileGuide (.com) also offer similar features, but your experience will depend on how useful you find the user-generated content posted on each one.
It's hard to discuss travel social networks without mentioning WAYN (.com), the seven year-old acronym for 'Where Are You Now?' that was launched to ostensibly unite travellers from around the world, before becoming another MySpace. What still works in its favour is its ability to let users get in touch with like-minded travellers efficiently. So, if it's mountain-biking in the Himalayas or hiking up Mount Huashan in China, this is probably where you'll find an equally enthusiastic partner.
Lindsay Pereira is Editor, MiD Day Online
twitter.com/ lindsaypereira
