No sooner did we cover Offbeat Guides, with its professionally printed and personalized guidebooks for travellers, than one of our spotters alerted us to a similar offering out of Austria: Tripwolf, which offers free, customized travel guides in PDF format.
Like Offbeat Guides, Tripwolf combines professional editorial content with user-generated content from some 13,000 globetrotters worldwide. The ad-supported site focuses primarily on Europe and is backed by MairDumont, Europe's largest publisher of travel guides (including the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands), which has put all of its high-quality content—covering more than 250,000 destinations and points of interest—online for free. Tripwolf also aggregates third-party content from sites like Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, and hotel price comparisons are powered by HotelsCombined.com. Community features include user-generated photos, travel blogs, ratings and advice as well as Facebook integration, with iPhone features and the ability to book flights or hotels coming soon. Once users have compiled all the information they need, they can build and print a personalized, free 10-to-20-page travel guide in PDF format to take along on their trips. Vienna-based Tripwolf was launched this summer with sites in German and English; a Spanish-language version is due next year.
As purse strings continue to tighten, it seems likely travellers will research trips ever more carefully to make sure their hard-earned travel dollars, euros and pesos don't get misspent, making sites like Tripwolf and Offbeat Guides increasingly useful. Tripwolf's next step? Team up with Blurb or Cafepress to offer consumers the option of bound books, too. A nicely bound travel guide in the hand is worth two in PDF... or something like that! ;-)
Website: www.tripwolf.com
Contact: info@tripwolf.com
Spotted by: Martina Meng
Glad to see these guys getting noticed. We at NileGuide (www.nileguide.com) are doing something similar, but we combined personalization filters with content from guidebooks, trusted brands, local experts, and users in order to create a rich interactive guidebook experience. Check us out!
I agree glad to see that these guides are noticed online, similar to the others we also create guidebooks, but our data is completely written by a communitty in a wiki. Furthermore anyone that creates a guide, can personalise it completely to his wishes. Check us out and write about your favorite spots around the globe!
Bart
www.writingtravellers.com
I like the site, but the printed guide feature seems pretty weak still. I made a guide of where I live (Quito, Ecuador) and it was just five pages, almost all hotel info. Not really useful. The idea has a lot of potential though, and that's why we're working towards similar goals at VIVA Travel Guides (vivatravelguides.com).
Travel planning is an interesting area (and fun to do!), so no wonder that there are several companies doing it. We at TripSay believe in personalization and aim at creating a site that will give users relevant info based on what they like, what they like to do on their vacations etc. Our recommendations and filtering go to the very grassroots level. It's about finding the small things on your trip or totally new ideas that you would've otherwise missed.