“Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources”

http://wikitravel.org/

So he’s reselling content from wikitravel.org in a PDF for $25 ???

Easy money. I don’t know who’s buying that though, aside from Mike.

Chris - that’s way too over simplified. Wikitravel is one data source for them, as I said, but they also add a LOT more information.

see, for example, the PDF above which they created for me for Paris and compare it to http://wikitravel.org/en/Paris

They are clearly adding value here. Plus, you are incorrect that they are selling PDFs for $25. The PDF is $9, for $25 you get a printed book.

Not a good time to have a start up in the travel industry — have you seen the price of oil lately?

Ryan, you mean the value of the dollar, don’t you? That’s what’s really hurting U.S. travel to Europe and Asia. Still, people travel. And when i do a quick trip to a city for business, I’ll be creating one of these and downloading it.

I’d REALLY like to see a partnership with Tripit
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ve-tripit/
and have my full itinerary included in the PDF.

http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/tripit/

Mike, Tripit has money. Don’t you think they would prefer copyrightable proprietary information vs. creative commons, public licensed content.

Realistically this is just free public domain content from wiki sites being cobbled together by automation into a PDF. There is nothing stopping another website from doing the same with the free content.

I would think that would turn off a company with 5.1M in investment that would want sovereign IP and articles vs. just software to cobble???

Data — cream of the crops, brilliant!

Chris

Tripit is a travel itinerary startup, it doesn’t compete with Offbeat Guides in any way. I just said I’d like to see a partnership.

As I said in my post, the company isn’t just taking open content and repackaging it, they also have deals with closed source content providers, too.

Could I gather most of this information myself, including creating maps and gathering currency exchange information and current weather? Sure. But I don’t. I t’s too much hassle so I just buy a lonely planet guide and forget the tailored and up to date stuff. With this, I get all of that for a cheaper price, and I can download it to my phone.

I think it’s a great service, and I suspect the major travel guides will move in this direction very quickly once they see how compelling it is.

Mike, I saw the bit about the closed sources. As I scanned the PDF, I was able to index most of it to the web under public licensed content.

I guess this is a very niche service, but even so, I see it vulnerable to altrasoft in a way that other services aren’t because most all of the components to this service are creatable with free software(LAMP PDF, CURL, SQL) and free public license documents online.

Something like twitter takes a lot of SMS money and the short code, then something like youtube will hog a great deal of bandwidth in comparison.

Chris - yes, well, this is different than twitter and youtube. on that we agree.

I do think the company has some big challenges. The established travel guides could, for example, customize their existing guides pretty easily and allow for pdf downloads at prices competitive to this, or cheaper. I just disagree with the points you are making, not the overall assumption that this may run into trouble.

thanks

The services that become valued all have key components which can not be automated by a script, be it excessive bandwidth or SMS charges, well known writers, partnerships with X industry whos services are uniquely being exposed through the web, ect…

I see 95% of this being chewed up and spat out by altrasoft et al.
Not that it’s my problem. The idea itself isn’t bad.

There’s a market for this.maybe not a large market, but there is a market. For “up to date” travel info delivered in this format, I would shell out 9 dollars for the time it would save me alone. I’ve routinely spent hours making posts on travel social networks, etc in attempts to compile the most up date to info before making a trip. As I travel extensively, this would save me time.

I didn’t actually feel like whipping out a credit card, but the idea sounds cool.

note to Offbeat Guides: I’d be a lot more inclined to pay if you had a sample pdf available to peruse. Perhaps paint a picture of a customer, and then show his customized guide to San Francisco in August or something.

That said, I’m not sure how much more value there really is to using this versus a good map, *maybe* a lonely planet book, and google, plus picking up the free newspaper in whatever town you’re in for info about current events and local businesses.

What a great idea!

In fact, this is something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time myself! Best to Sifry for this getting this great idea to action

BTW, I think that there is a huge market for this product I worked in the travel industry for some years and this is a highly desirable product. And as for LP, based on my [minimal] professional exposure to them, I’d be really surprised if they or any of the other traditional guides would be able to pull this off within the next 12 months. Sifry really has the lead here.

And the only opportunity isn’t just in the selling of the physical guide… Just one example of this would be the opportunity to offer highly targeted advertising to tourism operators to an audience that they know will be in a certain location at a certain time - and most likely looking to spend their leisure dollar!

I’m really looking forward to seeing this service develop!

So he’s charging for CC and LGPL licensed material largely written by someone else?!

Daryn, there’s a sample pdf above in the post.

Mathew - agree on the advertising. Theoretically they could offer the guide for free, or at a lower rate, with advertising thrown in that people might actually want. or they could just throw the advertising in anyway.

the point is, i know I’m going to use this, and if I had an admin I’d ask him to make one of these for every one of my trips and throw it on my phone.

I signed up but didn’t get any free coupons. And even though I just wanted to check what PDFs it makes it still asks for an US address.

Thanks Mike, I saw the sample after I posted. Looks pretty nice. They should post something similar on their site!

Mike, thanks for the great post! We’re really excited to launch the company, and to get so many people interested in the products.

Jevgeni, check your email - the coupon codes are in the email you get after you put in the invite code and sign up. The email comes from noreply@offbeatguides.com so check your spam folder too. If you still can’t find it, drop me an email at dave AT offbeatguides DOT com, and I’ll set up up personally.

We’re still very raw, there’s lots of stuff to do; bugs we’re finding and fixing as quickly as we can, and more features to come in the coming weeks. Getting a preview of the guide before you purchase is one of the top features we’re working on.

Thanks again for all your kind words, we’re going to work really hard to build a great product for all of you!

Dave

You may try our web service (TripTouch.com) that aggregates content and services for thousands worldwide location.

It includes travel guides, activities, restaurants, current events, accommodation, transportation, weather, currency rates, nearby travelers and more.
For many services online booking is available.
Everything is up-to-date and free.

Our service is also available as a widget for iGoogle and Netvibes:
http://www.triptouch.com/widgets

In looking for a travel guide aren’t you looking at just two things: quality of the information and the freshness of the information. Having it in PDF format or dead trees format is inconsequential.

Compared to LP, Fodor’s (my preference), and Footprints, the only thing he can market better is freshness since it’s updated in real time and forwarded to you.

But honestly, how simple is it for the other publishing companies from simply add that to their sales copy? Fodor’s name brand + faster reprints + competitive pricing means this is dead in the waters.

TripIt or Dopplr can easily add this to their products as well and it would seem they’re in the better position to do so considering they’re sticky webapps.

Nifty idea without huge upsides, he should apply to YCombinator with it.

The site has tons of UI bugs though. I emailed in a list.

Looks pretty good, they’re a bit pricey though. Hostelworld throws a PDF guide of the city, whenever you make a reservation with them, for free. This is good news however if they can really get up to date information. That’s the biggest issue with printed guides - they’re never up to date, even when they hit the stores.

Excellent service ! Niche or not, I always like having a guide to all the destinations I go to. See: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/rodrigo

Up-to-date info, generated on the web (often I have no time to go to a bookstore), could I ask for a better service ? maybe a discount / membership price after buying more than 10 of those ?

Interesting service, giving it a try with tc invite code!

@Mike.. TC is turning 3 on June 11th 2008 - any party planned ? Surprisingly you started TC back in June 2005 with an article on Technorati and yet June 2008 kicks off with article related to Technorati founder!

Cheers!

I received a flickr mail to allow them to use one of my pictures in the guide, but I didn’t know they were selling the guide!!! that’s crazy. I shall remove my picture from their list, I don’t want them to sell my pic along with their travel book

oops Im stupid, the company who contacted me was actually called schmap
sorry for the noise

When I saw the “Carlsbad” book title in the video, I was excited to see something from the Czech Republic. Carlsbad is the German name for Karlovy Vary, a very popular spa town west of Prague. Turns out it was Carlsbad, CA.

Speaking of Prague, when I tried to make my free guide it kept forcing me to choose Prague, Oklahoma. It finally accepted “Praha” (the local name for Prague), but I’m not sure that all tourists would know the local name.

at last, a startup on techcrunch with an actual business model.

I signed up for the beta - this sounds great. An up-to-date, indepth guide of anywhere I want at the touch of a button. Sure, I could spend a couple of hours collating it all myself from various sources but I’m very open to paying $10 a pop if it’s quick, high quality and does the job for me.

Very keen to try it out on some places I’ve visited to see how good the info is.

p.s. techcrunch invite code has expired :/

This is more customized than personalized. A personalized guide will only have stuff I need for the particular trip (based on my itinerary) and will not have anything I don’t need. Looking at the sample pdf from Mike, I think there is still a long way to go for the offbeat team if their goal is to provide personalized travel guides.

$25 for a travel guide? dang you guys have money to burn!

I actually think this is a decent idea. We’ll see more companies like this as quality (and free) information sources increase.

Look out for ZivityGuides.com. For $25 we’ll send you a Playboy-like magazine with the wannabe models on Zivity.

@34 >

add a customisation model (”no redheads…black lingerie only…”) and you might actually be onto something there…

250 codes on TechCrunch just don’t last as long as they used to ;(

Where is the more valuable advice in travel? From experts or the crowd?

The customization sounds great, something I’d pay for. But “lifting” content created in a wiki leaves a sour taste in my mouth and would cause me to pass. If it’s not original content, I can find the same information myself on the web. It would cost me time but there is a ton of free information out there already I can locate myself.

Bottom line, I’d purchase customized travel info from some company that actually had done some legwork and visited these locations, but not an armchair travel aggregator. I’ll take a look at their sample but if it is created in the manner described above, I’ll wait for some well-weathered travel guide company to get on the ball and create something similar.

Good Idea . I think people value their time and will use this to save time .

I Know I know
Everybody can a make a burger using ingredients from Walmart but why do so many people go to burger joints ??

You can just buy a bucket of ice cream form Walmart too so why buy expensive Ice cream from a restaurant .

Lonely Planet already has downloadable PDF’s of chapters you can choose of their travel guides, btw.

I used tripit, and I think they’re on the right track…..if enough ppl find out about it.

I like the idea. It would be a much easier sell for me if they allowed you to download the latest version at anytime during my trip.

If I took a two week vacation to Hawaii, for example, by the end of the trip much of the info would be stale by then. I should be able to log back in and get the latest and greatest guide.

i fancy the idea of the personally printed travel guide.

however, i was one of the lucky ones who got an invite for http://www.tripwolf.com and they are offering the service as well. altough it’s not working perfectly yet i love the fact that it mixes predefined content and user generated content with a slick drag n drop functuonality.

wondering if it makes sense to use the pdf print availbility as the one and only USP or if it’s better to integrate in another more complex service as a simple feature

Too expensive. A quick search on Amazon shows that I can get a professionally written and edited travel guide for about $15 or so depending on destination. Why would I pay a lot more for an assemblage of information that I can get for free anyway?

Sure, OffBeat has some up to date information, but I buy a travel guide for the depth of information packaged in an easily used form, not its currency.

I like the basic idea. It’s questionable how large a market exists at the price point this is offered. Remains to be seen.

This is a service the major online travel agencies could offer if they weren’t so focused on their old commission based business model and started to really innovate with a focus on customer added value, which this clearly is.

Another group of providers that could easily offer this - or maybe are potential partners - are the many destination marketing organizations and CVBs. They all sit on a ton of relevant data that is available for free on their websites but could be accessed and aggregated by Offbeat.

Besides Tripit, they should also look at Uptake and VibeAgent as potential partners.

Shameless plug to David: Read my bio, I could assist you with making it happen!

I’m curious how much traveling some of these naysayers have done. And I’m not talking about flying into a destination and sitting at a resort or following a preplanned tourist track.

I’ve traveled extensively and usually buy a couple travel books and spend dozens of hours downloading reviews and user-generated content off TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet and other online sources. It’s time consuming, tedious and requires a lot of filtering. In the end we still end up bringing our tour books, our laptop, and dozens of pages of printed notes and itenerary information.

Everytime we get back from a trip and start posting our notes and reviews we talk about making a service exactly like this - although our plan entailed a lot more personalization wrapped around granular flagging of custom content to help refine criteria not spelled out in most review sites. I suspect the people behind these sites have had similar experiences and knew there had to be a better way.

I’ll be spending six weeks in Hungary this summer and will definitely try this service out (as well as a couple of the other services mentioned here). Personally, I’m more than willing to spend $100 on various personalized tour guides if it allows me to minimize my research time, maximize my travel time and avoid some of the pitfalls of unplanned travel (e.g., shithole hotels, missed opportunities, on-the-road research, etc).

On the fly? Exactly.

Not surprisingly,
professional spammers create spams on the fly;
doggy operators create false adv on the fly;
cool guys make hoaxes on the fly;
… on the fly;

Anyone is going to purchase such thing on the fly?

pfff, who would pay for a beatoff guide? that’s just something you learn on your own. wait, what?

I think there is a market for Dave’s product, but it won’t appeal to everyone. I also don’t think he has violated any Creative Commons licenses, nor do I have a problem with the cost. Yes, you may gather much of this info on your own, but what is your time worth?

Travel is also something that is easily segmented. This product will appeal to a certain group. It won’t work for everyone, nor do I think it’s meant to. I’ve not been able to try the product (submitted my email) but I’m guessing it’s hitting the most popular destinations. In other words, it won’t necessarily hit the adventure travel segment. The places that Geographic Expeditions, Bushtracks Expeditions or A&K cater to. The same may be true for travelers requesting customized travel or FITs.

I do think the product would work well for conferences or trade shows. If I were a large company or conference organizer (e.g. TC 50), I might be inclined to strike a deal with these guys to get each attendee a customized version. This is great for attendees who are tacking on time before or after a show.

As for the name, it reminds me too much of a great travel outfitter called “Off the Beaten Path” in Bozeman, Montana. As it happens, they used to do very detailed itineraries for their clients. My guess is they still do.

hm. wait. what’s the brilliant part that deserves such a series of plugs from mike? is it that i write my stuff for free on wikitravel and these guys package it an sell it back to me? fascinating, yes, but worth a post on the economist, not here.

how about get a volunteer local guide at http://www.hieverywhere.com ?

Making friends and having a local perspective.

Sight spots are not as important as before, because we can see almost everything on TV or Youtube nowadays.