TripHub is a quite easy to use group travel organizer. The idea is to provide a series of tools to plan a travel among several people and to coordinate different details: time schedules, flight numbers, hotels, etc. Although the site is in english -obviously aiming at the american market mainly- it’s accesible to anyone who has a minimal knowledge of this language.

Besides the coordination tools, each group travel has an assigned blog to publish stories. What’s missing, at least in the current version, is a photo album or something similar. The contents upload interface is too basic, by the way. The information can be shared among the group members; for this, we can invite other people through emails.

As part of its business model, TripHub can allow us to search for flights and hotels; these transactions must be on commision. Besides, these pages have Google Adsense advertising.

While for now it’s pretty basic, TripHub fulfills its assignment. Surely it’ll have to add new functions if it wants to survive the competition of Yahoo! Trip Planner.

The “identity” of ethnic groups has been a topic of debate in the field of social studies on tourism, particularly since Dean Maccannell’s last decades contributions. We’ve already discussed this author in “Authenticity as an explanatory concept“. But there’s an interesting assumption behind: even when it’s quite possible that it prejudices them, groups that classify themselves or are classified as “ethnic” are interested in obtaining some kind of monetary income from tourism. That is, “selling” the difference.

But, what happens when a group has suffered real abuse from part of the tourism industry and the commercialization of its identity? This case is boarded by Jonathan Friedman at “Globalization and Localization”, included in his book Cultural Identity and Global process. The case chosen by Friedman is what’s known as “hawaian cultural movement”. Few cities have been so popular around the world through travel market’s proposals and the touristification of many of its dances and practices. Facing this, it’s understandable that this movement keeps an obstinated opposition to tourism.

After more than a century of american domination, hawaians have become a minority in a land they consider their own and only acquired certain visibility through touristic representations. That is, the problem is not the difussion of their “identity”, but rather how to present it to locals and foreigners ignoring the huge difussion power of the tourism media and industry. Such operation requires that what the media present as “hawaian identity” can be seen as something foreign and imposed, and possible to be reconstructed from outside the rules of the tourism field. That is, to conceive that the “authentic” quality is something that can not be “commercialized”. A task hard to carry out in a market society, where everything that may have some kind of attractive can always be reached by market insertion strategies.

Bibliography

Friedman, Jonathan (1994) “Globalización and localización” en Identidad Cultural y Proceso Global. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2001.

Starting from common sense: isn’t there lots of people who would love to be a travel writer? To be able to go from one place to the other, and being paid for this, is something truly enviable. Unfortunately, things sometimes are not so simple or pretty. Every time I read the phorum or blogs that gather travel writers or journalists -particularly freelance in english language media- I find an aboundance of complaints. That the payment is low; that there’s more marketing and less journalism; that the good times are gone… Any journalist knows that his job is quite conditioned by advertising, the incomes of the media and the attractiveness of the section you work in. And apparently, the media’s travel sections are more read by advertisers and actors of the tourism sector than by ordinary readers. Which would explain, partially, why the “media readers” choose the Internet to inform themselves about destinations. The reason: they can talk directely to other travelers and tourists without necessarily having to undergo the media’s filters and the travel companies’ marketing areas.

Let’s return to travel writers. Some days ago, The New York Times published an interesting article about the problems of being a travel guides writer. The core issue: this is work, not a leisure travel. So, everything you do when you travel in such conditions is… move around the places that will be useful to develop a travel guide that’s helpful to other travelers. That’s not what we see as usual in a travel, where we rather assume we’re relaxed and move from on place to the other without hurry or problems.

Do we move without hurry and carelessly around the city? I’m afraid this form of tourism we have incorporated as “what we do when we travel”, is quite far from many real travel practices. More likely, when we arrive to a city, we usually have so little time, we move frenetically around in order to see everything our guide has marked down as “must sees”. And it’s not only during the day, at night we also have to go out, take pictures, walk around, check out the “local environment”. At the end, when we return from our vacations, we’re more exhausted than when we left. Although, of course, strangely happy.

Could it be that, in fact, practices generally associated to travel writers are increasingly becoming part of our routines as travelers? When we travel, we produce more things in order to publish them in the Internet: pictures, travel notes, videos, etc. I know many of these supports were already common to travelers, taking notes is a travel tradition of many centuries; and taking photos, of many decades. But there’s a more clear idea of producing “private” and “public” versions of our travels, something common for a tourism journalist, but not so much for the rest of us. Of course, these “public” versions of our trips are possible thanks to new forms of Internet publications, such as blogs, phorums, etc.

Will we end up as travel writers, but without working in a traditional media?

And what about the problems of travel writers, finally? Better read the New York Times note (you’ll need to register in the site, for free, first)

The New York Times article was originally seen at Travel Writers.

Travel allows us to live our dreams. To travel is to be a witness of our courage to make dreams come true, to do everything we want to do. Travel gives testimony of our willpower, of our determination of the limits of our spirit. Travel is the line of the life of our inner passion, of the life that exists within ourselves. Travel is the line of our energy’s life.

Steve Zikman en El encanto de viajar. Buenos Aires, Vergara, 1999.

Maybe you don’t know it, but there’s a line in the self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel as a form of overcoming everyday’s life limitations. Zikman’s book, cited above, belongs to this segment. The tactic: to describe the travel uniquely as a positive thing, and relating it to people’s desire to leave everyday’s life problems behind.

This blog has always been aware of not falling easily on purely positive representations of travel. To conceive it as something “intrinsically good” has many problems. First, it means assuming as true travelers’ stories, who as any other social agent, seek to present their own practices as something positive -something we all do everyday. Second, because it makes us lose sight of the domination relations that take place within the field and the negative consequences of travel and tourism -which exist, and are relevant and should be studied.

What doesn’t surprise us is that self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel resorts to and old common sense: one that opposes “everyday life” to travel -a recopilation about travel common senses can be found in a previous entry here. As I said before, there’s no such opposition. What does exists is a relation by which travel only acquires its sense because there’s something we call everyday life. If we were nomads, relations between everyday life and travel surely wouldn’t be the same.

Most likely, very little in self help literature is valuable or original. Most of these books try to give answers and start from an obvious assumption: that readers buy these books to find these answers. And if they’re unhappy with their everyday life, appealing to the travel as a “liberty space” is a good form to offer simple and plausible “answers”. We all know that when we travel we feel “more free”. Sure, because we’re not working

If you’re interested in digging deeper in the subject of the relations between travel and common sense, you can also check a previous entry called “Travel as space of freedom an other common senses” that I wrote a year ago in this same blog.

More than a year ago, I published an entry dedicated to Flickr groups that had travel and tourism photos as a central topic. It’s been a while ago, specially in the fast paced Internet, and it’s time to update this list. If you have any suggestion about Flickr groups that are not listed here, leave them on the comments. Before I forget: soon there’ll be news about this blog’s Flickr group, as a way to build a travel photography group and be able to discuss them in spanish -besides, of course, to establish a new difussion channel for the travellers’ work.

Travel Photography: with more than 5 thousands participants, the travel photo group is close to the 100 thousands published pictures. To explore the group is a long hours task, but I guarantee you’ll find excellent pictures.

Lonely Planet Bluelist: a group of travel pictures that comes from the publication of Bluelist, edited by Lonely Planet, which selects the best travel experiences. It’s relatively new, but it already has more than 500 members and 1500 photos. Only one picture per day can be published.

Travel Portraits: pictures of people we’ve found in our trips. Almost a thousand photos, more than 120 members.

Public Transportation: about public transportation means in several places in the world. 170 members, over one thousand photos.

Globetrekkers: with more than 720 members, they’re close to 14 thousands pictures of many places in the world.

Road Trip America: road pictures of the USA.

Visit the world: another travel photo group, with almost 100 thousands images.

Travel Pix: another large group of travel photographs, with over 40 thousands images.

Travellers and Landmarks: general topic travel pictures.

South America: South America pictures. The group is mostly in english, but the fact that it has about 10 tohusands pictures about our region makes it very attractive.

Passport Stamps and Visas: this is one of my favorites. It simply is about pictures of stamps that embellish your passport. Frankly, in some cases the number of stamps is remarkable. OBviously, you’ll feel pretty envious when looking at those passports.

Trenes: in spanish, a group dedicated to trains, with over 40 members and 200 published pictures. Your contributions are welcome.

Trains and Trolleys: obviously, photos of trains and trolleys.

Aeroplane in flight: pictures taken on flight. I’m sure we all have one of this kind.

Route 66: The Mother Road, the most famous route in the USA.

City Sunsets: while this is not a group specifically dedicated to tourism, the idea to photograph sunsets in various cities can’t help to be attractive to a traveller. It’s quite popular: 522 members and almost 1400 photos.

Motels: potentially an interesting project, which has grown a lot in this last year, and has over 200 participants.

By the way, even when Flickr is actually a quite good publishing platform, it still lacks some important tools when building groups. For example, a tool to filter images by popularity, or the number of people that have marked it as a favorite. They’ve added some functions in the groups; such as the possibility to limit the number of pictures that a member can publish by day. But it’s time to add new ones, if Flickr doens’t want to be left behind.

It’s not unusual to find articles, particularly journalistic articles, with “common sense” affirmations which tend to confront “real” vs “virtual”. If a person spends a certain number of hours in the Internet, some apocaliptic voices will say they “don’t have a real life” -apply this to any other thing related to the Net: keep a blog, chat, navigate, whatever. The idea is simple: the “virtual” character of the Internet opposes to the “real” side of our everyday “offline” life.

But such opposition is not quite productive. If we look closely, we’ll see that a good part of Net users are mainly interested in taking better advantage of certain “real world” life experiences. And the travel market is clearly an example of this. As we’ve been observing for more than five years now, the Internet is crucially modifying the way consumers experience the travel market, they make reservations, search for information and contact other travellers before leaving home. The vast aboundance of online resources has greater interest in providing users ways to improve their travel experiences. Thus, it’s even easier to find and make a hotel reservation online; or talk to other users about certain destinations, to avoid falling into openly publicitary articles or texts; or narrate our own travel experiences in our sites, blogs or phorums.

What use would it have in this moment in history to state an opposition between “real” and “virtual” in the travel market on the Internet? If we take into consideration the growing number of Internet users, and the number of travellers moving around the world, we’ll see that in the last years these numbers have grown. We could hypothesize about how both forces potentiate themselves; more Internet users means more travellers used to build their travel with information taken from the Net. Facing this, of course, the traditional media will have to start reconsidering the way they get to their readers, who don’t want to know anything about “impressive landscapes” or nonsense like that, but who would rather have information and advices to build their own travel experiences.

And a good part of Internet uses for the travel market is still unexploited. We’ll see what happens when ratings systems for destinations, hotels and bars are generalized, and when smarter search and comparation (of flight tickets, hotel rooms, etc.) tools appear.

What kind of use do you make of the Internet when planning a trip? I’m interested in knowing my readers’ opinion, to know what kind of Web tools they’ve been using to build their trips. Because there’s always someone who’s found some new and original use. Do you use online communities to relate to other travellers? Do you always make a hotel reservation online? Have you had any bad Web-based reservations experiences? Leave you opinion in the comments area.