Travel Planning Frustration
So I am going on an actual vacation for the first time in over a year. Which I am understandably excited about. However, its amazingly difficult to find information about what I want online. And since I would like to be able to know whats happening when I get there, the paper stuff I can pick up on arrival just doesn’t do the trick.
I am heading to Sanibel Island, and these are my options for websites:
Those are all completely useless, they were built in 2002 or 2003, they have no updated information and who knows when they were last updated. I looked to Yelp, http://www.yelp.com/c/sanibel-fl/restaurants - nothing particularly useful they only have 5 restaurants reviewed. But hidden in one of the comments was the mention of a blog: this one - http://www.sanibelcaptivadaily.com/category/restaurants/ and finally I found something. Not particularly good, because there is a lot of local jargon type stuff I don’t really care about as a visitor, but its nice to know that the local residents have a strong sense of civic pride.
My point here is that its awfully difficult to find good local information about remote or even not so remote places. Basically if its not a major city or a randomly enlightened small town there is no info about that town online. I’m not talking population and basic business listings with maps, but valuable content on where to go and what to do while I’m there. Good local content is hard to find, and thats a problem I have with the internet. At least with searching on the internet. There is no resource for up to date information on small interesting localities. And even if there was, could you find it? (I am having more and more issues with Google just doing a bad job of indexing good information vs favoriting really old static pages, but thats another post)
Tripadvisor is great for reading about things to do and hotels (and “adventures”), Yelp is great for reviews on restaurants and shops - but all of those are resources for things that happened in the past. Even the reviews from last week won’t tell me whats happening next weekend. If I hear about an event on one site, I then have to head over to Yelp to find out if the place its being held is legit. The world needs a steady resource for local information, activities, restaurants, shops and things to do. And I want a calendar around those things and of course I want to know what other people’s experiences were like.
Fortunately I know of a resource like this, its just a matter of getting to all these great places in the world.
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