Blog homeLast month I asked if anyone wanted me to review their website (to be published on this blog).
6 brave (or PR hungry) websites / companies came forward….. so I thought I would repeat the offer. (see last months entries, and my review of OkTaTaByeBye (a travel community based in India)).
My rules
- If I see or experience something that needs to be improved I am likely to say so.
- I am less lenient on large brands who have the budgets to get it right first time….. it is 2008 now… not 2000.
- As a travel ecommerce consultant I have a rule that I won’t give an opinion that an idea (or execution) is rubbish unless I have a better idea…. I use this same principle when undertaking a website review (especially a public one). i.e. I won’t just be critical (if deserved)…. but offer helpful advice.
To be reviewed add a message on this post outlining why you believe your travel website or service should be considered. In 7 days time I will pick one (the one with the best reason or that will be of most interest to travel industry readers)….. If you entered before, please enter again…. (if you wish!)
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G’day Alex,
Here’s the main reason our site should be reviewed….it’s not *another* social network or crowd sourced aggregator
http://panedia.com
We’re a content development company doing new things for online travel with panoramic virtual tours….all extremely high quality content…all shot by professional photographers. We do put our content on maps (like Google with Streetview) but a quick look at our sites will show that we’re not a Streetview (or Everyscape, Mapjack, Earthmine, BlueDasher + the rest) copy. We’re not trying to shoot every street in the world….we professionally shoot things that travellers may want to see.
So far we use the content produced on 3 sites, as linked from our main site above, with many more to come. You may also want to read our blog where I’ve outlined the main features of the sites & provided a Panedia VS Streetview comparison.
All the site are in various stages of development, with commercial release coming soon.
Thanks, Aaron Spence.
http://blog.panedia.com
Biting the bullet here and asking you consider Travellerspoint. We’re in the middle of planning a revamp, mostly design wise, to make our services clearer and constructive criticism would be appreciated. Of course it would be even better if you had no criticism, but I somehow doubt it. No site is perfect!
@ Aaron - those images are great. I think you are right…. travellers want lovely, inspirational photos…. (vs streetview from Google). But Google is probably more for the “practical” traveller - you are going for the “dreamer” traveller. I could spend a long time on your site.
@ Sam - yeah - I think on rereading what I wrote in my post above I do come across as a bit patronising / egocentric. Sometimes I can be a nice guy (and write positive things!)
Hi Alex,
I want to try my luck again this month
I want to ask you to give your advice/criticism about TripnTale, a site for travellers to save all their trip photos, videos and journals for free unlimited storage. TripnTale also offers social networking features to connect with other travellers or simply to share your trips with friends and families.
We’ve made a lot of efforts into making uploading photos very easy and enjoyable by allowing user to upload a batch of photos at once (with realtime progress) as well as enabling them to import photos/videos directly from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug or Youtube. You can learn more about it here http://www.tripntale.com/tour.aspx
Last but not least, we’ve introduced a concept called social points that users will be able to accumulate by contributing to TripnTale and with enough points, they’ll be able to redeem some cool rewards.
Last but not least, with free unlimited storage and bandwidth, user can embed their slideshows in Facebook, MySpace or blogs (oh, and there’s a FaceBook app we created a month ago to let users showcase their trips).
Sorry for a lengthy comment, we’re very eager to get your review
Thanks in advance,
Darwin
I’ll throw my hat in the ring.
Travelfish (www.travelfish.org) focuses on delivering original content for independent travellers heading to Southeast Asia (primarily Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam). We steer clear of the UGC throngs, restricting member contributions to comments on accommodation and a small, but very useful messageboard.
Instead of UGC, the backbone of our content is authored by a team of paid researchers. Our team has independently reviewed over 3,500 guesthouses and other lodgings in the region — many of which you’ll read about nowhere but on Travelfish. We also cover destinations nobody else does.
Information is provided through the website gratis, but it’s also bundled-up into PDF formatted “Travelfish Guides” which are sold through the site — most costing less than a beach massage (or a big coffee — depending on your weakness). Drop me a line if you’d like to see a few copies.
Cheers
Stuart
Thanks Alex, and good point on practical vs dream travellers. Once Streetview launches here in Oz we plan to include their content in our site which will give viewers the best of both worlds.
BTW: there’s not time limit on viewing our sites…so spend as long as you want
Hi everyone,
I have now done the mini review for the month
http://www.tourcms.com/blog/2008/05/12/panoramic-photos-expert-vs-community-vs-google/
Thanks Stuart, Darwin and Sam….. there is always next month
No worries Alex; thanks for offering this from time to time though. Pretty neat. One thing I thought you might be interested in looking at that we just launched on Travellerspoint is the concept of Social Bookings - http://www.travellerspoint.com/forum.cfm?thread=49936 . I think you talked about something somewhat similar for tours a while ago here and we had just finished coding this when I read your post. I’m pretty sure this is unique to online accommodation bookings; a hard feat to pull off with all those big players around