Offbeat Guides Public Beta: On-Demand, Personalized Travel Books

http://www.offbeatguides.com/

by dsifry • 18 years ago

4 11 18 years ago

My new company just went live to public beta today - Offbeat Guides. After months of effort, over 6,000 private beta testers' feedback, and hundreds of bugs quashed. we just went live.

What's the big idea? On-demand, personalized travel books, for over 30,000 cities around the world. All the details are here: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html

Would love to get your thoughts and feedback!

dsifry5• 18 years ago

Blog post announcing the public beta, along with a whole raft of informationa bout what it is all about is here:

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_...

jamess3• 18 years ago

A great idea poorly implemented. Most of the info seems to be cadged without attribution from wikitravel, often with the formatting poorly stripped.

I'd really love to be able to create a guide tailored to my interests, but this isn't anywhere near it. The best thing they could do right now is discard the whole database and start small, with one city at a time done in extreme detail. Know how to get from any point A to point B in a city at any time of the day, by every means and keep that info up to date. List every possible tourist attraction, categorise them and keep that list up to date too. Get more detail on local events. Contract a local contact on a piecework basis to help maintain the city guide and add to it as appropriate. If this is too expensive, do one city and seek funding based on that demo.

As it stands, the guides offered give far less value than an off the shelf travel guide.

dsifry5• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback - we're learning a lot and all feedback and commentary is valuable and useful, so thanks for your comments! We have a team of editors and curators, but obviously we can't cover every place at launch, so we work hard to cover the long tail of destinations algorithmically. What city did you try to build? I will have out content team have a deeper look into it to fix it up.

Regarding attribution, we do use information from sites like Wikitravel and Wikipedia, and there's a References chapter in every book - you can find it, along with the URLs that we used to pull together your book in that section.

Your points are excellent ones, thanks for the feedback! This is just the initial release of the beta to the public, and getting feedback, criticism and suggestions like yours is VERY valuable. Thanks again!!!

Dave

jamess3• 18 years ago

I tried a number of cities, your own home of San Francisco, my own of Cambridge, UK as well as some others I'm familiar with like Bangalore and Tapei. I was very disappointed that the San Francisco guide was of far worse quality than the Cambridge guide for example. I would have expected since the company is there, you might have something interesting to say about the city. Apparently not.

The list of events is worse than useless, it's cheap and tacky. For example, the events for Bangalore lists events in places such as Shanghai and somewhere on the Indian coast over 500Km away, as well as events tourists couldn't possibly be interested in such as agricultural machinery expos. You just can't do this sort of thing by pulling events unfiltered from external sources, that just doesn't work. Full stop. I want a sensible listing of events that I can filter by my interests, each one with a map of the location and public transport details.

The issues you have can't be fixed with copy editing. You simply can't produce a guide to a place you've never been, and you really shouldn't try. This talk about covering a "long tail" of destinations depresses me. Leave that stuff to wikitravel, you should be producing a polished commercial product. At a minimum you need to at least have had one person representing the company visiting each place you produce a guide to. You aren't in the business producing a general purpose guide, you're in the business of knowing everything there is to know about a city and giving people a decent interface to filtering it. Quite frankly, I don't see how you can do that without a team of people going to a place for at least a month.

Some features I'd pay for:

* Suggested itineraries for days, based on a database of places and activities filtered by my interests and biased by predicted weather.

* Some sort of more/less detail slider for each page enabling me to customise the text.

* Complete and up to date public transport listings for the destination, cross referenced with the events and places I've chosen to add to my guide.

Above all, if I'm paying for something that costs about the same as the rough guide I want something at least as good quality as the rough guide. You aren't going to get that with wikitravel and creative commons photos.

superic• 18 years ago

We're totally committed to making the guides better! The more specific issues you can cite (formatting, the destinations you tried, etc) the better we can do to fix them. Do you know of other resources that we can poll for events that maybe we've missed?

jamess3• 18 years ago

Aw, man. Don't make me bang my head on the desk.

You can't do this by polling free information from the web! Tourists aren't interested in when the next Linux user group meeting is! You need your own list of events updated from local knowledge. Half the interesting stuff is only advertised by people handing out fliers on the street. That means you need to pay people to gather this information for you, which has the knock on effect that you can't cover the whole world, just the bits of it to which lots of tourists go. Isn't this already obvious to you?

jacobscott• 18 years ago

Nothing on the front page of the website says beta. It's only when I get to the step of my book being created that I have multiple timeouts and I need to refresh multiple times. In fact, the page even has in bold:

"We're having some occasional time-outs; until we crack that, if the information takes longer than a minute or two to come up, just refresh this page."

I think this is poor user experience, and not having the site clearly marked as beta may give users undue expectations. Not trying to be too harsh, but I have spent five minutes and haven't seen even the TOC of my personalized travel guide.

dsifry5• 18 years ago

Good point. We actually had the beta label in there, but somehow it got dropped out when we did our final QA. We'll get it back in there.

dsifry5• 18 years ago

The beta message is back in there. Thanks!

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

My initial complaint is that its kind of expensive. Travel books at my local bookstore (that I can buy the day before I travel) generally cost less than $20.

Offbeat Guides Public Beta: On-Demand, Personalized Travel Books

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