Wednesday, September 03, 2008
OffbeatGuides.com Travel Guide Review
I'm sure most of you have heard about Dave Sifry's latest venture, OffbeatGuides, and some of you may even have access to the current beta of the system. For quite some time I've wanted to post a review of Offbeat Guides but couldn't find the time... as I was starting my week vacation two days after taking the system for a spin. But alas, I've made the time and will make this an atypical review as I'd like to do a bit of review on Mr. Sifry himself.Most of you know Dave Sifry as the founder and former CEO of Technorati and that he fell under harsh criticism for the infrastructure issues that plagued the pioneering blog search engine. However, there is another side that I don't believe has had any light shed on it and I think it's about time Senor Sifry got a pat on the back rather than a knife in it.
Quick Review of OffbeatGuides
I like the fact that you type in your destination and the guide generation system walks you through a handful of key steps, asking key questions like "What city do you live in" (important if you're driving to the new location ;). Your travel dates: probably obvious but this is used to generate weather forecasts and I'm sure at some future date to offer advertisers the ability to market to folks who will be in their destination at that time as well as offer seasonal advice. Then you enter either the hotel you're staying in or the street address of the place you're renting. This step is absolutely ripe for the advertising for large hotel chains but I also think they should partner up with TJ & the gang at FlipKey since FlipKey has one of the largest vacation rental databases and they have more reviews of vacation home rental agencies than anyone on the planet... Oh and they just got a big investment by TripAdvisor, which we all know is owned by Expedia so that partnership wouldn't be too bad either.
Once you've finished answering the 5 questions, which takes 2 - 4 minutes tops, then you're presented with an outline of the customized travel guide created specifically for you. You can click on each of the chapters and get a preview of the information contained in it and now you can even add your own chapter... this is great if you're planning a trip for your family and want to make some notes and would like to send everyone in the family an official "Dowdell Family 2008 Vacation Guide" complete with rules and prizes. I'm only partially joking but it is quite neat.
In the version I used back in June I did find that there were a few blank pages in the printed version of the guide that arrived at our house as well as the pdf version but the guide was quite nice.
Some Recommendations
One thing I wish it had was a listing of all of the grocery stores in the area. No matter where we go on vacation to as a family, the first place we hit is the local grocery store and if that information was automagically generated in the guide it would be superb. There are many other features I'd like to see in it such as iPhone integration for the "top 10 things we MUST do on vacation" in order to avoid arguments 2 days after being on vacation so that mama gets to do her top 2 items and papa gets to do his and the girls can do theirs. All in all, I think this is a solid product with some great features and I think Dave is doing the right thing by taking it slow and not rushing this baby out into full blown production just yet.
Kudos to Dave and Crew
I'd like to shift the focus a bit now onto Dave himself and his ability to get those around him passionately involved and committed to a project because I believe that skill has been overlooked during his time at Technorati and he deserves big props.
While I was beta testing OffbeatGuides I ran into a bug and didn't see a way to file a bug with the OG team so I thought, well heck, Dave is a pretty personal guy so I bet his email is such and such @ offbeatguides.com. Well, I fired off an email (with detailed buggy behavior I was experiencing) at 8:22 PM and Dave responded at 8:39 PM saying that I was right, it was a regex issue and I can give it another try. It took him 17 minutes to respond with a well formed email and his developers had fixed my issue, moved it to production and was ready for me to test it again!!!! That is simply amazing customer service. So my hat is off to Dave because I remember him doing the same thing when he was at Technorati. He'd responded promptly to all requests I made and assigned engineers on the spot to ensure prompt issue resolution. So I would like to close by offering my sincerest wishes of best luck to Dave and his team, I know they'll do great.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:03 AM
Permanent Link: OffbeatGuides.com Travel Guide Review
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