Getting good travel advice from the online crowd

Looking back at my favorite vacation spots, several have one vital thing in common: They were suggested by friends.

It’s no surprise that travelers tend to trust the advice of people they know. Now, several new travel websites are trying to put those inclinations to use by allowing travelers to use social media sites for targeted trip advice.

Take Gogobot.com and Afar.com, which both made their debuts last year. Each allows users to post specific questions about upcoming trips to both Facebook friends and users of the sites.

“It’s not who you know, it’s who you need to know,” said Derek Butcher, chief technology officer of Afar Media, which also publishes the travel magazine Afar.

Gtrot.com, which focuses on users’ immediate network of Facebook contacts, operates on the premise that 10 recommendations from friends you trust are better than 100 suggestions from people you don’t know.

Planning a trip to Ecuador, I signed up with these three sites to see what kind of travel insights I could glean. For the most part, they offered advantages to simply posting a question on Facebook or Twitter. Below, an overview.

Afar.com: This social networking site offers personalized recommendations from travelers, locals who share your interests, and editors and writers at Afar.

An initial travel personality quiz is designed to connect you with people with similar tastes. Based on my answers, I was dubbed an “active adventurer” who likes to get outside as much as possible, avoids tourist haunts and doesn’t mind roughing it a little. (Not too far off.)

I then filled out a profile with a Facebook-like layout that allowed me to post previous trip highlights with photos and ask questions about my coming trip. The site sends your queries only to members who are familiar with the destination at issue. (You can also link your account to Facebook, which allows you to send the same question to your contacts there.) .

By the next day, Jeremy Saum, an editor at the magazine, posted a response to my questions about where to stay and eat in Quito, offering ideas from an article that ran in Afar magazine, with some very specific tips. “Ask for the room on the first floor with the claw-foot bathtub,” he noted about Cafe Cultura, a Quito B-and-B.

For more tips, a nifty feature aggregates previous recommendations from members and automatically files them under a tab with the name of the city right above your question.

Bottom line: A clean, simple layout makes navigating this site a breeze. But while you get good personalized advice, it’s up to you to search out phones, addresses and other details in order to put the advice to use. And like the magazine, the site seems to tend toward off-the-beaten-path destinations; if you’re looking for more mainstream recommendations, Afar might not be your best resource.

Gogobot.com: This trip-planning site also taps your social networks (Facebook and Twitter) for advice, but provides a few added layers. Unlike Afar, it will supply photos, phone numbers and addresses, if available, for the recommendations users make. It also includes tools to help you build an itinerary that you can adjust as you go.

I chose not to query my Facebook friends or Twitter followers, just to see what advice might surface from Gogobot users. Within a day, I received a response from a well-traveled member. It was only one response, but it included six insightful recommendations about where to go in Ecuador. His description of the Mitad del Mundo, a monument that marks the equator, which I knew from past visits, was dead on: “The one and only reason to go here is for the novelty of taking your picture spread eagle across the Northern and Southern hemispheres.” (Turns out he is such an avid user of Gogobot that the company now pays him on a freelance basis to help cover some obscure destinations.)

Gogobot can also sync with Foursquare and Facebook so your public check-ins on those sites show up on your Gogobot profile. . Members can review or rate hotels, restaurants and activities, earning stamps in their virtual passport which can then be shared with friends.

Bottom line: An efficient way to build an itinerary based on recommendations from friends and other travelers. The site makes it simple to record where you’ve been so that you can easily share your favorite places with friends.

Gtrot.com: Essentially a travel companion to Facebook, Gtrot was created by Harvard students in 2009 as a way for college students to keep track of friends while on school break. Now anyone can link their Facebook accounts to the site to share their plans and get travel advice.

The first step is to search for the city you are headed to and plug in your travel dates. You can also email your itinerary to trips@gtrot.com to add it automatically to your planned trips. The site will then pull up a list of Facebook friends who have visited, lived in or are planning a trip to those cities at the same time.

You can ask your friends for tips or invite them to meet up by typing a message into Gtrot, which posts to your friends’ Facebook page. Gtrot then pulls all the related comments back into the site and files them with your trip.

The more active you and your Facebook friends are, the better Gtrot works. It didn’t work so well for me. For my trip to Ecuador, I sent a Gtrot message to nine of my relatives who live there. Only two responded. Also, because Gtrot determines which friends may have advice on a place based on what they make public in their Facebook profiles, not all of my family members who have been to Quito showed up.

Gtrot says it plans to address this glitch by allowing users to add Facebook friends who they know have visited a region but may not have indicated so on their profile to trip queries. By the end of August it plans to offer lists of hotels, restaurants and things to do that have been crowd-sourced from Gtrot’s 10,000-member base.

Bottom line: Until that happens, when it comes to travel advice, Gtrot is only as helpful as your Facebook friends.

Share and Enjoy

Old Vienna Coffee House Has Facebook Talking

Social Media Saturday is a weekly feature where we highlight your questions and thoughts shared on Facebook and other media throughout the past week. We’ll also point you to some new and interesting pages you may not have known about before.

Highlights of the Week

We have 512 followers on Facebook this week. Thank you to the best followers on Facebook! And a big thank you to our 181 Twitter followers, too.

We took a little cruise down memory lane – well, make that South Street – and the Old Vienna Coffee House. Asking who remembered going there, we were answered with 14 posts and 17 thumbs up. We liked reading about the different shows that readers listed. If you have one that comes to mind, be sure to stop by the Westborough Patch Facebook page and share the memory!

Also on Facebook this week, a blog by restaurant reviewer Gary Kelley roused a few when he shared the tale of a mediocre experience at Tomasso in Southborough. It seems that a few readers disagreed with the review and let us know on the Westborough Patch Facebook page. Everyone who has had a dinner at Tomasso is welcome to chime in. How did you find the experience? Visit us on Facebook and let others know.

Finally, readers shared concern after learning of the Wednesday armed robbery at Robinson Music on Milk Street. We posted the story shortly after news broke, and readers replied with good wishes to the Robinson Music staff. We were relieved to read a post from Robinson Music telling Westborough Patch and our readers that everyone was okay. Thank you for taking a minute to do that, Robinson Music!

Social Media Page of the Week

For anyone who enjoys music (um, that would be MOST of us!), the Robinson Music Inc. Facebook page has great tips about practicing, instruments, upcoming programs and more. The store is a great resource for town musicians and the Facebook page offers an extra place to get information. The Robinson Music Inc. Facebook page is our social media page of the week.

Your Town on Facebook

For more Facebook pages Westborough residents might find interesting, check out our list of “liked” pages on Westborough Patch’s Facebook. And don’t forget to follow Westborough Patch at www.facebook.com/WestboroughPatch.

You also can follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/WestboroPatch.

Share and Enjoy