By SHANNON KELLY
Looking for a last-minute vacation or just a great deal on a hotel or flight? Here are six of our favourite online and mobile travel tools for keeping your vacation on budget. (more…)
travel websites
TravelAvenue: Like Pinterest, but Exclusively for Travel
By SHANNON KELLY
Screenshot, TravelAvenue.com
New online photo-sharing site TravelAvenue calls itself a “virtual personal travel notebook”. If you’ve used Pinterest, you’ll find it easy to get the hang of TravelAvenue, but the site has aspirations beyond just photo sharing. In an interview with Tnooz, TravelAvenue president Loic Dupont said that the company wants to “radically change the way [travellers] organize their research online”. (more…)
TripAdvisor’s New Local Picks Facebook App
By SHANNON KELLY
Local Picks screenshot
Facebook and TripAdvisor have teamed up to launch a Facebook-hosted restaurant app called Local Picks. The app is meant to highlight neighbourhood favourites as rated and reviewed on TripAdvisor by locals from the area you’re searching and covers more than 850,000 restaurants worldwide. (more…)
And the Webby Award for Travel Goes To…
By SHANNON KELLY
Webby Award 2012 winners in travel: Kayak (background/left) and the FlightBoard app (foreground/right)
The 16th annual Webby Awards winners were announced yesterday, with top honours in the Travel category going to travel-booking site Kayak. The site not only won the Webby, but the People’s Voice Award for its site and its app. (more…)
Travel Free If You’re Sexy, with MissTravel.com
By SHANNON KELLY
You used to have to chat a guy up in a bar, at least, to get him to take you to Paris. No more. Travel “dating” site MissTravel.com connects “generous” travellers (99 per cent of them men) with “attractive” travel lovers with no funds to travel. (more…)
On Obscura Day, Celebrate Canada’s Weirdest Places
By WAHEEDA HARRIS
World's largest weathervane, Yukon (Photo: Arthur Chapman)
Finding the recently discovered or unknown can be tough for a traveller. But AtlasObscura.com, an online atlas devoted to the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica, is fixated on the strange. (more…)
Better Budget Travel: Compare Hostels with New Web Site Hostelzoo
By SHANNON KELLY
Hostelzoo search results in grid layout (Screenshot: Hostelzoo.com)
Considering a hostel but not sure where to start? New Web site Hostelzoo is an excellent tool for comparing hostels, with lots of images and information about each property—all laid out in easy-to-read grids. More than 40,000 hostels around the world are indexed (direct quote: “Every hostel in the world that is available to book online is listed on our site.”), with more than 400 in Canada. (more…)
Google Has a Street View of the Amazon Rainforest—Why Not the Northwest Passage?
By SHANNON KELLY
Screenshot of Google's Amazon rainforest Street View
Last week Google rolled out a Street View tour of the Amazon rainforest. Not all 6,400 km of the Amazon River, but a portion of the Rio Negro tributary in the Amazon rainforest. This got us thinking about all the cool things Street View could do for Canadian travel. (more…)
Cowbird: From Journaling to Journalism
By CARISSA BLUESTONE
Cowbird works well as a platform for sharing travel stories and photos (Screenshot: Cowbird.com)
Sites that help you share trip photos and map favorite places are a dime a dozen. But Cowbird, a new diary platform with a global eye, could help you hone trip tidbits into travel journalism.
Travel Reviews Matter, Even If They’re Wrong
By SHANNON KELLY
Reviews of Montreal's Au Pied de Cochon on Gogobot (Screenshot: Gogobot.com)
The recent bruhaha in the UK over TripAdvisor’s not-so-trustworthy “reviews you can trust” has brought the issue of whether user reviews can be trusted front and centre. But it seems that travellers rely on them anyway, according to research from eDigital Research, a research firm specializing in online businesses.