Three years ago, I received an unexpected e-mail explaining that I was to be sent to work in Kenya for the better part of a year. This came as a surprise, since the job I had applied for was based in London. But my employers had other ideas, so it quickly became important that I acquaint myself with the East African country.
What I discovered was that, in 2002, if you wanted to use the Internet to learn about a travel destination, your options were few and unappealing. You could Google your destination and get random detritus. You could visit the website of a guidebook publisher, where a few unhelpful morsels would be meted out in the hopes that you'd buy the publication.
Or, you could browse the travel advisories of Canada's federal government, whose job seemed to be to present the worst-case travel scenario for every place on Earth, so that if nothing else, you couldn't say Foreign Affairs didn't warn you about the risk of getting eaten by a shark while being mugged during a landslide.
Thankfully, the Internet has evolved since then. Nowadays, a new breed of travel website is eschewing guidebook authors in favour of tapping the wisdom of the masses. Around the Web, the readers of the Internet have become the writers of the Internet — and travel sites have been quick to hop on the bandwagon.
Here, then, are five of the newest ways for today's desktop traveller to scope out the world:
Rate the planet
There's nobody so instantly, insufferably expert on a part of the world as the person who's just come back from a vacation there. Modern travel websites know that the delighted and disgruntled alike love a forum for venting, and are asking readers to rate their hotels, conveyances, and diversions. This lets surfers browse hotels by their average rating, as well as by price and location.
Take Tripadvisor, which collects user testimonials by the boatload. Most hotels and attractions have garnered enough reviews to give readers a cross-section of opinion; of course, well-trafficked destinations get the most attention, so don't expect too much coverage of, say, Moldova's lesser hostelry. Tripadvisor covers destinations worldwide, but it's geared more towards vacationers than backpackers.
One fringe benefit: Any rating system that lets you find the most positive reviews will also let you find the most scathing, and this is always entertaining. For instance, the worst-rated accommodations in Las Vegas turn out to be in a major chain hotel on the Strip. Visitors left a raft of horrified reviews on Tripadvisor, with titles that included "Very bad place," "Do not stay here," "Time for demolition," and "Free used condoms!"
E-schmooze
Not everyone has the blogging gene that makes sharing with the world irresistable, but the travel weblog is an undeniably handy tool. For one thing, it allows you to keep friends and family in the loop without resorting to long mass e-mails that begin with an apology for mass e-mailing. For another, you can't accidentally leave it on the bus.
But newer sites are taking the blogging concept a step further, adding photo albums and linking bloggers to each other based on similar travel interests and destinations. If you're a blogging traveller, this can put you in touch with a network of peers who have visited the same destinations as yourself — and might still be there. If you're still pondering a trip, you can read ahead and see how other travellers fared.
Real Travel and TravelPod are two such sites, both catering primarily to adventure travellers. Another star of the new-age travel Web is 43places, a fun gimmick that asks users to name 43 places they'd like to go, and links them that way.
Rewrite the book
Anyone who's discovered that taxi rates have tripled, public washrooms have vanished and the local hostel has fallen into the sea since their guidebook was written will understand the urge to march directly to the guidebook's publisher and demand a rewrite of the miserable thing on the spot.
This more or less sums up the concept of Wiki travel writing. Like the much-discussed Wikipedia, a "Wiki" is a website that allows readers to add or edit as much content as they please. And the Wikipedia's little cousin, Wikitravel , is devoted to amassing the collective wisdom of world travellers, one article at a time.
Unlike sites that solicit specific pieces of information in narrow categories, such as hotel reviews, Wikis allow travellers to create content from scratch. Want to add a page about one of Patagonia's smaller municipalities? Please do. Want to add a page about how the guidebook lies? That's between you and your lawyers. Right now, content is a bit sparse, but watch for Wikitravel to grow.
Take up armchair cartography
Clickable world maps are de rigeur these days — for example, Globe Travel's site, along with its counterpart at the New York Times, have made the newspapers' archived travel stories accessible through a zooming map interface.
At the same time, the Google Maps phenomenon is changing the way people view the world. The Google Map is a scrollable, zoomable map and satellite view of the whole world that fits inside even the tiniest browser window. (If you haven't already, you can see the master map at maps.google.com. At the moment, though, only North America, Britain and Japan are covered in detail.) Google left the door open for people to add Google Maps to their own webpages, and annotate them for their own purposes.
While some sites use Google maps to point out where readers' journeys have taken them, a remarkable site called Wayfaring lets readers annotate Google maps however they please. The result: Anonymous travellers have created everything from neighbourhood tours to national guides to "Places I like to drink."
The beauty of this approach is that it provides a very personal, almost intimate view of the world. A neighbourhood bar doesn't have to be highly ranked by dozens of users to show up; it just has to be one person's favourite watering hole. And because each entry is right on the map, if you decide to investigate in person, you'll have no trouble finding it.
Plan every last little thing
If chance isn't your thing, you can beat the last gasp of spontaneity out of your trip with the likes of Expedia and Yahoo! Travel. Both these sites mine massive databases to create virtual travel agencies that are all-encompassing, if not a little intimidating.
Expedia is branching out from flights, hotels, and car rentals to let users compile an itinerary of local attractions. The selection of things to do in a city can be limited, but Expedia's strong point is allowing you to book tickets to attractions on-line, along with the flight and hotel. Expedia features some reader reviews, but tends to downplay them.
On the other hand, Yahoo has whole-heartedly embraced reader-centric travel advice. Beyond the on-line airline and hotel bookings, Yahoo lets you plan your itinerary hour by hour, from the car rental and ferry ride to lunch on Wednesday, drawing on its user-suggested list of things to do. You can even look at other users' painfully detailed agendas; if you're really that hard up, a button lets you copy somebody else's daily plans and use them as your own.
Better still, the dozens of attractions it suggests for each city — many of them non-commercial, like strolls through neighbourhoods and parks — are listed in order of popularity with readers, because, sure enough, readers are reviewing each one. Evidently, Yahoo's not in the business of booking tickets to these attractions. But the wealth of information that its users have shared is a destination unto itself. Before you fly, go see what a guy in South Dakota thinks of a patch of grass in Vancouver, and thank your lucky stars for being on-line in 2006.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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