Europe a la Carte Blog

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Today, if you don’t mind, I would like to start a discussion. Actually, what I’m doing is trying to pick the collective mind of Europe a la Carte readers, but don’t want to look so needy. So here’s your topic: Guidebooks, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love tourist traps.

Oh yes, a controversial topic and one which I’ve already loaded. I am, as I’ve already mentioned a lot, a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kinda traveller. I don’t like being organised, I revel in the freedom of not having any idea what today brings. Itineraries are useful bits of paper when I’m getting someone’s address and plans are things used to build skyscrapers. But when you move around in this fashion it really is vital to have a quick, encompassing source of reference to work out where, tonight, you’ll lay your head.

Home on the Road by tpuyol

Of course there is a big problem associated with this: you see only the things that your guidebook tells you are good, and you go to places that are filled only with other tourists clutching their copy of The Book in sweaty hands.

Now the web offers a lot of information, this blog is being one example, but the problem is how to distil it. It can take a lot of surfing around to gather the specifics you are after. If I’m in a small town outside Ljubljana internet access may not be a given - plus on the road I’d rather be experiencing the country than communing with Google.

Where Shall I Go? by The Wandering Angel

The behemoth of all guidebooks, Lonely Planet, is usually the first I go to because I’m familiar with it and can quickly get the addresses I need. Let’s Go and Rough Guide are also hugely popular, but I always had issues with the accuracy of the maps – although I haven’t bought one in a few years now so that may have improved. Regardless of which you pick though, you’ll still find yourself in a sea of other foreigners, not a local amongst them, all looking for an “authentic” experience. I have even switched to German guidebooks to try and avoid this trap, but that’s just resulted in being surrounded by German, Austrian and Swiss tourists and waiters speaking in the Teutonic tongue.

So I need your help. Where do you go for information? What are your favourite, or least favourite, guidebooks? Where are their failings and strengths? Who can help me work out where I should be sleeping tonight, in a small town outside Ljubljana?

You would be forgiven for assuming from my last few posts that I am a complete gadget geek. To a certain extent this is true – I love finding new and cool tech tools and wasting far too much time playing around with them – but there is one piece of modern technology which I have never developed an affinity for: The Global Positioning System (GPS) or Satellite Navigation (Sat Nav).

Cadence’s GPS’s lost again by Marcin Wichary

In the map vs GPS debate I come down firmly on the side of paper. While a GPS will get you from A to B, you’ll completely miss C, that cute little village you would have stumbled into by misreading the Cyrillic sign for Highway. And let’s not forget D, the picturesque views from the tiny mountain roads that your navigation system has bypassed in its silken female voice in favour of truck infested Autobahns.

No, a detailed map lets you explore a country, to wander across it with your gaze and be struck by the whim of driving a green marked scenic route or visiting a random town you’ve never heard of. A GPS system is not going to recommend dropping past Titisee because your inner child wants a photo of the town’s sign.

My favourite map of all is the 1:40 000 map of Estonia I picked up a few years ago. At this resolution farm tracks were visible, erratic boulders and sacrifice stones clearly labelled and the tree planted by the Dalai Lama got its own symbol. The legend was joy to read, an adventure in minutiae and largely dictated our weaving course across the country.

Orientamento by Novecentino

Of permanent residence in our car is the Europe map from the German automobile club, ADAC. At 1:300 000 it is perfectly adequate for navigating Germany, while the 1:750 000 maps of all other European countries will get you around in a general sense. A glimpse is enough to tell me that now, sitting outside Venice, I am only a hundred-odd kilometres from Slovenia. This important piece of information is certainly not proffered by a GPS system –“At the next intersection. You are. One. Hundred. Kilometres. From an unplanned travel experience.”

I do have a word of warning though. The Michelin 1:300 000 map of Italy is total pants. Towns on the map do not correlate to any road signs you pass and the highways are charmingly marked in the smallest, least readable font they could find. Exactly what you need when trying to negotiate the web of autostrada surrounding Milan as Fiats driven one handed by phone-talking Italians weave close enough to let you do the dialling for them. I spent an hour trying to negotiate our way to the only campsite in the city and by the end was frustrated enough to start thinking of a GPS with a wistful sigh. Luckily, a glass of red and plate of antipasti was enough to cure me of that fleeting thought.

Right now I’m sitting in a campsite in Taesch, Switzerland, hoping for the weather to clear and to get my first glimpse of the Matterhorn in real life. It isn’t looking good unfortunately.

Fortunately, though, the campsite has WiFi so I can let people know where I am, what I’m up to and that the weather hasn’t been playing nicely. When you are travelling off the beaten track and making up the day’s plans as you go along, easy internet access is not a given. I lay in bed last night beneath these giant mountains, the grey bulk of a previous landside blocking half the valley only a few hundred metres away, and realised that if the mountain above me gave way no one would know we were here.

Yes, occasionally I can be a bit over dramatic. It makes trying to fall asleep peacefully that much more of a challenge.

Now, I do have my mobile phone with me and a contract which gives me international roaming. I can SMS family and friends to let them know where I am, but that’s somehow just too 1990’s. In the glorious new Web2.0 I can message to Twitter directly from my phone.

Fun Twitter shirt seen at LIFT

Twitter is a microblogging platform which lets you send SMS length texts out into the web. You develop a network of followers, who all get your latest updates in their Twitter feed and you can follow others, keeping up-to-date on whatever they’re doing. It’s like mini-RSS feeds, or the status updates in Facebook. Europe a la Carte has one. Because of the brevity, it’s less time consuming to write than a full blog post and more informal. People tend to update multiple times a day and create ongoing conversations with their followers. You can do it all from the web, a desktop application or from your phone; and use it to inform people on life’s minutiae, your latest blog posts or even update your Facebook status automatically.

By tweeting where I am and what I am doing, I can let family and friends all know what’s going on right now. A single SMS is accessible to all of them, and even to my blog readers, via a twitter badge on my site. I can share my experiences with the world, as they happen and without a laptop or wifi connection, and I can fall asleep knowing that should that ravine collapse they’ll know where to erect the headstone: “Here lies Jacinta. She came, she saw, she tweeted.”

Good - easy to use meta search tailored to your specific requirements with simultaneous search of standard and dynamic packages which delivered competitive prices

Bad - very little information about the accommodation or resort provided

Rating out of 10 - 9.5 This is how travel search should be - user friendly delivering results based on your criteria.

When I read that Holiday.co.uk claims to “find exactly what you want”, I thought I’d give it a test run to see if it lived up to that claim.

I decided to search for a Winter Sun holiday flying from Scotland for one week on 21 November 2008, plus or minus 7 days. I started off searching for a beach holiday with no destination specified. The cheapest holiday, a dynamic package ( where the flight and accommodation came from different suppliers) was £120 per person for flight and self catering studio at the 3 star Mediterraneo in Nerja, Spain. An upgrade to a one bedroom apartment with balcony took the price per person up to £165. The apartments receive pretty favourable reviews.

Nerja seafront by Sonti Malonti

I thought I’d compare prices with a couple of other suppliers. The cheapest offering from Travelsupermarket.com was £176 for a one bedroom apartment at the 2 star Vistamar in Benidorm. Reviews of the Vistamar were varied with a few reviews from hen/stag parties (enough to put me off).

I tried to get a price on Expedia and although I entered the dates in November it came up with options in July. When I returned to home page to start the search again, I noticed that I had to either select to search for a standard package or a dynamic package, when on Holiday.co.uk one search brought up results for standard packages and dynamic packages.

By that time I was fed up with Expedia so decided to try Holidaywarehouse.co.uk where I’ve found cheap holidays in the past. The cheapest option with them was a self catering standard package in Gran Canaria priced at £293 per person. However when I clicked through this came up as sold out, very annoying. Now I acknowledge that the weather will probably be warmer in the Canaries in November than in mainland Spain and it is a much longer flight which makes the holiday more expensive.

I have to say that I was very impressed with Holiday.co.uk. It did come up with the cheapest holiday with accommodation which is rated as reasonable in user generated reviews. I think I’d rather stay in Nerja than Benidorm, as Nerja iss not quite so touristy as Benidorm. Holiday.co.uk was the easiest and most detailed search to perform, out of four sites that I tried.

There are also further search options on Holiday.co.uk where you can search by keywords such as quiet, kids entertainment, history etc. You can also further refine your search by criteria such as average temperature, specific tour operator, board basis etc.

My only criticism is that there was not much information about the hotel, only a pretty brief description, one tiny photo and no reviews. However I don’t consider this to be a serious defect, as I always look for information and reviews on several different sites before I book accommodation.

So based on my trial run, I’d rate Holiday.co.uk as excellent, delivering on their claim to find exactly what I wanted, a cheap Winter Sun holiday, with the no hassle or laboured searching. This is how I want travel search to be, user friendly and with personalised results.

Have you used Holiday.co.uk, how would you rate it?

I recently added a Feedjit live traffic feed widget to the side bar of the blog which shows the geographical location of blog readers. I was amazed to see that the blog had been read today in Mongolia (perhaps Genghis Khan is an avid fan), as well as Chile, Rwanda, Brazil, Thailand and Malaysia.

It’s free to add a Feedjit widget to your blog or website, you don’t even have to register. I think it’s fun addition to your blog or website. What do you think?

I really liked the Flip video camera as it was small (wee is the Scottish word for small), light and easy to use, it truly is a point and shoot product. No fiddling around with buttons or controls or trying to comprehend a manual. I just can’t be bothered with bulky, complicated cameras and camcorders. You can zoom in, add your own commentary and play back immediately. The Flip can take up to 60 minutes of footage.  It was straight forward to transfer from the Flip to our Mac and then upload the videos to youtube.

I enjoyed watching our videos upon our return from a week touring Tuscany and Unmbria as it did make you feel like you were back in the location again, due to the panoramic views and the sound track. I just wish I’d had something like this to take videos of our sons when they were young.

There is a built in USB in the Flip but I couldn’t fit this into any of the USB ports my Mac either because the ports were recessed on the CPU, the screen stand was in the way of the ports at the back of the monitor and the port on the keyboard didn’t have enough power. A £3 USB to USB was the solution.

The Flip costs around £100 to purchase which I think is good value. It comes in a variety of colours.

However as I always say the proof of the pudding is in the eating so there’s a short video of Perugia in Umbria, taken by my husband, for you to judge the quality of the picture and sound. You can see all the uploaded Europe a la Carte videos on youtube.

I was offered a Flip video camera free of charge by the Flip marketing team as part of the UK launch. However I was under no obligation to write any review. This is my unbiased opinion on the product.

I recently blogged about Travel Alltop and how I think it’s great to have the most recent post headlines of the leading travel blogs on a single site. This set me thinking that there’s now no need to subscribe to blogs on your favourite topics if you can just skim down the topic page on Alltop.

I may be shot down in flames for such heresy by many bloggers for whom one definition of the success of their blog is measured by the number of RSS subscribers proudly displayed on their blogs. I’m looking at it from the readers’ perspective. Why be b(l)ogged down with all the posts from several blogs when you can easily and simply pick and mix what takes your fancy on the Alltop topic page? You could argue that reading the most recent post titles of the 60 or so travel blogs featured in Alltop Travel will increase information overload.

I suppose this is going to put even more pressure on bloggers to come up with zappy post titles to attract readers. Will it force we bloggers to come up with consistent excellent posts for readers to become subscribers to ensure they never miss any of our riveting posts?

I’ve never been too obsessed by my subscriber numbers. I look at my overall blog stats. Of course all we bloggers would love to have regular readers but you can have regular readers who aren’t subscribers. I still believe if I produce interesting, informative and entertaining contents I’ll get readers. It’s great that readers now have more choice in how they access blogs.

Will you still continue to subscribe to your favourite blogs? Are fellow bloggers concerned about the possible decline in subscribers?

Booking travel online can be confusing and complicated.

When I booked my flight from Glasgow to Berlin on the Easyjet site, I just wanted to book a flight but I had to go down a long list of options e.g. travel insurance, speedy boarding etc. It was really annoying and time consuming to untick all the options which I didn’t want. I’d prefer it if you had to tick any options you wanted but I know that airlines wnat to sell you these extras and often the revenue they generate from the extras subsidises the low fares.

My worst online booking experience was when I tried to book accommodation in Fuerteventura on the On the Beach site. I entered my credit card details and nothing happened, no confirmation or message saying my card details had been entered incorrectly. I entered my details again and still nothing. At this stage I began to panic slightly, thinking what if I’ve booked the accommodation twice. I phoned On the Beach and they said they couldn’t help me over the phone I’d need to wait for an reply by email. I emailed On the Beach and 24 hours later they got back to me to say that they had no record of my booking, They was no apology, no explanation or no offer to take my booking over the telephone.

What’s your worst online booking experience?

I’ve registered with Twitter. I regard it as a mini blog, where I can write snippets about what I’m doing and what’s happening in my travel business. You can follow me on Twitter by receiving updates.

Twitter allows visitors to see that my travel business is run by a real person, giving the site an credible feel. Twitter is a tool in establishing my brand as a great resource for travellers wanting to experience authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget.

Do you use Twitter, if so what do you like about it?

Kango have launched a travel blog search widget to make it easier to find and search  travel blogs. If there are any travel blogs that you’d like to see added to the search engine you can make suggestions.

Travel Search

The Kango site aims to become the ultimate travel information search engine, which works in a simple and intuitive manner. You can search for trip recommendations based on you specific theme criteria, e.g. romantic, family, pet friendly. The results will then come up with recommendations, based on your priorities, gleaned for a multitude of sources, avoiding the need for you to search through several different sites. However you won’t be able to compare price or book directly through Kango.

At present the site is in beta and only covers Hawaii and California.