Personalized Travel Guides

= travel guides that are collectively produced, and customized at the time of travel

Examples

"Offbeat Guides creates personalized, up-to-date travel guides to more than 30,000 travel destinations using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Users begin by inputting their destination, their departure location, their name and their dates of travel. Offbeat Guides' technology base of spiders and crawlers then goes out and finds the best information available on the internet—tapping such sites as Wikitravel, Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance, AccuWeather, Google Maps and Eventful—and combines it with the most current information from a stable of established authors and thousands of locals. The preliminary result is a guide book of some 100 pages including local maps, festivals and events, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more. Users can then customize that initial report, deleting unnecessary chapters, for instance, or adding information such as their itinerary or recommendations from friends. Once they're satisfied, they can download their guide in PDF format for USD 9.95, or they can order a full-colour, 8.5-by-4.5-inch printed guide for USD 24.95.

Based in San Francisco, Offbeat Guides joins a space populated by competitors with similar—yet different—business models, including TripIt (which we've previously featured), Miss Information, Virtual Tourist and Nile Project" (http://www.springwise.com/media_publishing/personalized_travel_books_blen/)