Twitter tips, up-to-the minute websites and customised apps bursting with locals' advice are all changing the way we travel. But does it mean the end of the guidebooks?
Benji Lanyado, a UK journalist reports:
Eight years ago this September I was furiously flicking through Lonely Planet's Europe on a Shoestring guide. I had finished school, worked all summer, and was heading off on a tour of European football grounds. The guidebook was more than 1,000 pages long and weighed almost as much as my luggage. It was the combined work of a dozen of Lonely Planet's elite travel writers, and for a month it was my bible.Four weeks ago I visited Manchester on a short break. I took a change of pants and socks, a spare T-shirt and my mobile phone. When I arrived in the city, I told Twitter that I was hungry, and within minutes I was gorging on corned-beef hash thanks to a recommendation from a fellow Tweeter. I held my phone up to Piccadilly Gardens, turned on an app, and its Wikipedia entry flashed across my screen, overlaid on to the grass in front of me through the camera in my phone. I opened another app, and dozens of local suggestions were hovering around me. There was a bar 288m from where I was standing where I'd get a free drink if I mentioned a secret word to a barman called Angus.
Eight years isn't a very long time. But very little remains of how I used to travel. Things started to change the first summer after my football trip, two weeks prior to a journey through the Balkans. I spent hours scouring the internet for bus routes through Montenegro, and ferry timetables among the Dalmatian islands, and where to locate the cheapest bed in Ljubljana. And the internet always had an answer, often contributed by a local or someone who had just been there. I found a cheap hotel in Sarajevo through the then three-year-old TripAdvisor, recommended by an actual Bosnian. In Belgrade, another user-generated tips site recommended a tiny restaurant in the old town where I could stuff myself with lamb stew for £2 and wash it down with a 15p glass of plum brandy.
When I got home, I was a guidebook refusenik. They offered me nothing beyond the decently concise history section. Their information was limited when compared with the internet's infinite channels of wisdom. And it was outdated from the moment it was printed. I even decided to start my own user-generated travel site, Young in Europe (RIP), to collate the tips of student backpackers as they returned from their travels. Why on earth would I want to know what a travel writer thought was great when I could find out what 200 people like me thought was great?
My website was relatively successful, and the Guardian invited me to write a monthly column during my final year at university. I was to visit different cities in Europe for as little money as possible. I Googled my brains out.
Gradually a new obsession replaced the old one. The user-generated content was increasingly conflicted and there was just too much of it. So I moved on to blogs. At the time they seemed perfect: bedroom writers sharing their enthusiasm for places in their city. It was idiosyncratic, specialised information straight from the locals' mouths.
I went to New York to meet the writers of Gridskipper – one of the best blogs in the business (which now, for the record, is crap) – and spent a week living their life. One night I was taken to a clandestine warehouse table-tennis club in Brooklyn. It was outrageously pretentious but couldn't have been further from the tourist trail – which is what I was after.
With each online development, I felt like I was getting closer to the locals. My next obsession took me into their homes. I started extensively using CouchSurfing – a wildly popular site that helps people find free beds and couches in cities all around the world. I stayed in student dorms in Swedish university towns and plush colonial-era houses in Madrid via communist-built tower blocks on the outskirts of Wroclaw in Poland. I learned more about a city in two hours with a local than I did reading the entire city section in a guidebook.
Benji on a 'TwiTrip' in Croatia.
And then, about 18 months ago, I started travelling with Twitter. I headed off on assignments without planning a thing. I began in Paris, where I arrived at the Gare du Nord and began slinging questions into the ether. For 48 hours the people of Twitter guided me around the city, from backstreet art galleries in obscure eastern suburbs to glorious belle époque eating halls in Montmartre. Every tip was tailored to my exact time and location. I wasn't recommended any old restaurant for dinner either – I was urged to go to one within a 10-minute walk of where I was standing. I've been on regular "TwiTrips" ever since and am never disappointed with what is recommended… from genteel picnics on Oxford college lawns to transvestite cabaret clubs in Blackpool.
And now my expectations of what the web can do for travel is changing again. The last year has seen the proliferation of location-based apps, tailored to be permanently aware of where their users are. When you open Foursquare, the trailblazer of the new wave, the GPS in your phone tells the app where you are standing and displays dozens of tips within a few minutes of your precise location. It can even tell you who is in them – users are encouraged to "check in" wherever they are in order to accrue points and badges. It's geeky, but it's working – the game element is catalysing Foursquare's exponential growth. The site counted its 3 millionth user in August, less than two months after it passed the 2 million mark. On Yelp, another location-based app, nearby destinations are also rated by users, and you can choose the most popular gallery or bar or restaurant closest to where you are standing.
What once required hours of rifling through guidebooks, or Googling into the provincial nooks of the internet, is now attainable in an instant. And increasingly we don't need to find the information. It can find us.
Foursquare displays dozens of tips near your location on a smartphone. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Having convinced the online public to reveal who they are (through social networking sites such as Facebook) and what they are doing (via Twitter), the web's latest question is significantly more zoomed in: where are you? Location-specific information is what we want, especially when we are travelling. In a survey conducted for the World Travel and Tourism Council, 63% of travellers revealed that they used a mobile map service on holiday, significantly more than any other web service – including social networks, blogs, podcasts and the rest. The number one travel-related search term in the UK is Google Maps, and has been for a long time.
The location apps seem to be feeding from our desire to be more adventurous when we leave our homes. According to Tim Hughes, an internet travel industry expert, after 15 years of online travel being about transactions, "We are moving from answering closed questions – how much for a ticket to New York? – to answering open ones – where should I go next?" It seems we are getting more open to ideas because we know just how many ideas are out there via a few clicks on your phone.
And soon perhaps we won't even have to click. Siri, an app billed as "the personal assistant on your phone" and currently available in the US only, weaves together listings from dozens of services – flight finders, restaurant recommendations, taxi services, live music – and pulls them into a single place. Robert Scoble, an American tech evangelist, ran a blog post in February proclaiming that "if you miss Siri, you'll miss the future of the web". You don't type into Siri; you talk to it. The app gradually learns to understand your voice, and can process multifaceted requests, such as: "Where is a romantic Italian restaurant with a table at 8pm close to where I am?" It even helps you when you mess up your words. When asked to "Take me drunk, I'm home", Siri will order a taxi to arrive at exactly where you are standing.
Until recently, however, there's been a significant snag. Using the web from your phone while abroad can mean returning home to gargantuan phone bills. But even that's beginning to change. Last July roaming prices were slashed across Europe as the EC capped wholesale data transfer at 85p per megabyte – a 70% cut on some previous tariffs. This week the EU Digital Agenda Commissioner proposed banning roaming charges altogether.
The death of the guidebook has been predicted for some time. And if the roaming charges go, the final nails will be hammered in…
The most useful travel apps
Foursquare: A location-based game with thousands of tips added by users
Yelp: A popular listing service, with excellent restaurant and bar listings
Kayak: Flight-comparison app, with fare tracking
Time Out: (coming soon) The best city guides in print are about to roll out a series of excellent apps
Google Maps: Indispensable. The most travel-related search term in the UK
Layar: Augmented reality app with various layers – music, architecture, food – overlaid on a camera interface
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