Helpful tools for travel planning

Posted by Bill on Monday, July 7, 2008   |   No Comments

Let’s say you need to attend a conference in Cincinnati for work. You decide to take your spouse along. The hotel is kind of a non-issue because your company has booked you into the same place that’s hosting the conference in the middle of downtown. Let’s also assume that there’s a continental breakfast and lunch provided each day for convention goers, but your evenings are free.

So you want to find neat places for your spouse to eat and explore during the day and really cool choices for the dinners you can share each evening. Then, there’s the free weekend you have in the city. The convention runs from Monday through Thursday, so you have the entire weekend to enjoy Cincinnati. How do you find the good stuff and make the most of your time there?

There are lots of options, of course. City Web sites, calling or visiting the local visitors’ center, talking to hotel staff, picking the brain of trusted travel agents before you leave. They all work to one degree or another. Thanks to the Internet, you can add a few more options, and they’re all generally related to the social networks so popular today.

Probably the most comprehensive is Yelp. Its home page says, “Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great—and not so great—in your area.” Yelp has more than a dozen categories, ranging from restaurants, shopping and nightlife to beauty/spas, home services and automotive. The neat thing about services like Yelp is that the reviews are by real people (think you and me), not high-brow evaluations by snooty commentators who tend to be out of touch with (or talk down to) the rest of us.

As you might guess, Yelp has a huge following in big, metro areas. My daughter and son-in-law in Chicago use it all the time. But you can use Yelp most everywhere. For a list of locations, click here.

For the international travelers out there, you might find Qype useful. It’s a lot like Yelp, but doesn’t have the lengthy list of categories. According to the home page, “Qype is all about recommending your favorite places and connections with other people.” Qype covers more than 70 different countries. For a specific list, visit the site.

Similar to Yelp is Menuism. (“Menuism is the social network for people who love to visit restaurants. Interact with local foodies over plate-by-plate reviews and pictures.”) Clearly, Menuism is specific to restaurants. It is not nearly as comprehensive as Yelp. I did a few experimental searches for Michigan cities, large and small. I found that the reviews of a given city tended to be limited in number and that some smaller communities don’t have any restaurant reviews yet. The listings will increase, of course, as more and more users discover the service and write their own reviews.

For travel planning, these services have two obvious advantages: 1) They’re a great way to find local treasures near you that you’ve overlooked. 2) When planning visits to unfamiliar cities, they make finding the cool places (and stuff) fast and easy. Give ‘em a try.

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