I was just reading the latest from Techcrunch post, NileGuide Wants To Be Your Personalized Travel Agent And Concierge. If Techcrunch is impressed with a travel site, then I think it bares looking into.
In the post, NileGuide is compared to some other Trip Planner sites such as TripAdvisor, Zicasso,TripWolf, and OffBeat Guides(I’ll have to check them out).
So I went on the NileGuide site and created an account..a place to add website links would be sweet for us travel bloggers. I did put the url for this site and for our blogger travel blog onto my profile page, but they are not linked up to the actual sites so visitors can only go to our sites if they copy and paste the url. Hopefully that will change in the future.
I also noticed that NileGuide has a Nile Guide Blog as well, with an associated NileGuide Twitter account as well..added you guys..
Clicking on the Choose Your Destination Button on the home page, visitors can click on any of over a hundred destinations for which they can plan a trip. I clicked on the New York trip package button and was taken to the New York travel Guide section..To bad I didn’t know about this travel resource before our trip to SES NY last month. It could have made our New York getaway that much more enjoyable.
Destination Highlights which includes
- top places to stay
- top travel guides from your destination(could be tour guides)
- top things to do in your destination
- top restaurants
- top bars and clubs
You can also do comparison shopping for tickets for hotels, flights and more.
I also like the destination background information. Visitors to the site can learn how the name “The Big Apple” came to be. In addition to finding historical data, visitors can also find more specific information about the various neighborhoods. There are well over a dozen neighborhoods listed on the New York Travel Guide. Each neighborhood section has a bit of background info on each neighborhood as well as some standard data such as the number of hotels, number of things to do, number of restaurants, and the number of bars and clubs.
Well I am going to suggest that if any readers are thinking about planning a trip, that they give NileGuide a try and stop back and let us know what you think of their services.
Interesting offering. I like that NG allows people to “think outside of the hotel” where the other majors like Expedia, et. al. seem to miss the mark. While this is a nice differentiation, I do think that it lacks in the sense that it’s very difficult for me to make a determination on whether or not I would actually like any of the “things to do” or restaurants they show me. Normally when traveling to a new place you find the best things to do by listening to locals (friends, concierge, etc.). This is a very tough problem to tackle on the web when descriptions and keywords/attributes can be very subjective.
I work for a startup called Sortuv.com ( http://www.sortuv.com ) which tries to tackle some of these problems (especially with local search and travel) by allowing you to find new places by relating them to something you already know. So instead of relying on subjective keywords to describe what you are looking for, you could say something like “find me a restaurant in Miami sortuv like 13 Coins Restaurant, Seattle”. With this approach you’ve basically been able to describe the “vibe” of what you’re looking for without having to describe it.
Just to be clear, I don’t view NG as a competitor. I actually think our technology could be quite complimentary to their offering.
Sounds like a very interesting product Jim. I’ll have to do a review of Sortuv.com.