Getting to the point

Have Kindle, Will Travel — And Stay Up-To-Date Thanks To Offbeat Guides

Posted: 26 Apr 2009 10:00 PM PDT

I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong. It's still way too expensive, but it's great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides.

Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to find 500 of the company's newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here's why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month.

This means they can include information such as real-time events for specific cities, like concerts or festivals. It also means the guides can have a Kindle menu option to find out something going on in the city you are visiting that night. For tourists who don't know anyone in a particular city, that's a great feature.

There are a couple downsides. Naturally, because the Kindle only handles grayscale images, you won't get the full color pictures you usually find in other tour guides. And because the Kindle's screen isn't ideal for displaying maps, tailored, local maps that are a part of Offbeat Guides regular guides aren't included here.

But, at 10.2 ounces (for the latest version), the Kindle is likely lighter than regular tour guides. And, if you're planning a multiple city trip, you can obviously load up a bunch of these guides on one Kindle. One thing that particularly excites me is the fact that you can also view these on your iPhone if you go somewhere and don't feel like carrying around a Kindle. Because the Kindle app on the iPhone stays in sync with the Kindle content, you can bookmark pages and look at them later on your phone.

Offbeat Guides has been working on these Kindle-tailored guides for 6 months now, CEO Dave Sifry tells me. He also notes that there are 5 times as many cities available as compared to other guides. Right now, if you plan on traveling to a city often and want the most up-to-date guide, you'll have to buy a new one each time. But Sifry says they will explore the possibility of having subscriptions for certain cities if customers demand that. Such a feature may even be useful to locals of a particular city to know what is going on. But the focus right now remains on leisure and business travelers, he says.

Find a full list of the Offbeat Guides Kindle options here.

 

Holy dumb name

April 8, 2009 10:01 AM PDT CNET

Hotelicopter is real, though simply a travel search engine

Hotelicopter the travel search engine is not nearly as exciting a concept as a converted Soviet chopper-turned-air hotel, but it does an admirable job at scouring the Web to find you deals on hotel bookings. It searches and aggregates the results from more than 30 different hotel deals sites like Priceline, Hotels.com, and Booking.com, and jumps you straight to each provider's purchase page.

One of its nice features is the option to narrow down the area of a town for which you want it to search for results either through a drop down list of neighborhoods or by drawing a fence within the results map. It will then refresh with results only from that area, right down to a half-block radius. This can be handy if you know the place you're visiting.

Included is the option to log in and link it up with your Facebook account using Facebook Connect, which for now is simply a way to bypass registering with the site, and promote that you're using it on your profile every time you book a trip. What would be far more interesting though, is if it pulled a Dopplr and would let you know a friend who lived in each place where you were planning to travel. That way you could ask if you could couch surf and save some money. Of course, that's not how Hotelicopter makes its money, which is in referrals to all these booking sites and on-page Google ads, but I think it would make for a far more compelling product.

Hotelicopter lets you narrow down the results you want to see by simply drawing a fence around an area of the map. You can also filter by neighborhoods.

(Credit: CNET Networks)