The Thirteen Best Online Travel Guides

Chris Sherman on July 25, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Virtually all of the famous print travel guides have online counterparts. Most are just as packed with information, photos and maps as their print versions. Most also have planning tools, community, deals and other online-specific features. Surprisingly, for sites that offer information about travel and moving around the world, many don t have mobile versions of their websites, though some do have apps or iBook versions.

If you ve ever browsed the print versions of many of these travel guides, you know that they re largely similar, and the one that works best for you is largely a matter of subjective taste. That s true online, as well. I d recommend sampling what each has to offer before picking out a few favorites to return to as trusted resources.

Arrivalguides.com

Billing itself as the world s largest network of free travel guides, Arrivalguides.com is unique in that it s entirely web-based, and all of its guides are available as free, high-quality PDF downloads. Although the website is available in either English or Swedish, if you click through to individual destination cities you ll often find options to download the guide in different languages, including the local language spoken at the destination. Arrivalguides.com doesn t have a mobile version, but does offer free downloads of its most popular guides in the iTunes app store.

Concierge.com

Fodor s

Frommers.com

Let s Go Travel Guides

Lonely Planet

Rough Guides

Ruba

Traveldk.com

Trip Advisor

tripwolf

Wikitravel

The Wikipedia of travel, Wikitravel is an open source worldwide travel guide with more than 23,000 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe. Wikitravel s site automatically detects access from mobile devices and reformats itself for mobile viewing. There are two (paid) apps that use Wikitravel data available in the iTunes app store.

Yahoo Travel

Yahoo Travel is the most fully-featured travel vertical offered by the three major search engines. In addition to numerous research guides and booking tools, you can also create a profile, creating maps of places you ve been or want to go, organizing your travel photo albums, plans and ratings and reviews. Surprisingly, for a company that does so much with mobile, the Yahoo Travel website doesn t automatically detect mobile devices, yet Yahoo Travel does have a mobile version available at m.travel.yahoo.com.

All of these online travel guides offer useful information and tools but all to a degree are steeped in tradition and don t fully take advantage of the interactive potential of the web. Not to worry an entire new generation of travel research and planning tools has emerged with some seriously cool features baked in that make the travel planning process a delight. They are the focus in the next installment of this series, Travel Planning Tools: The Next Generation (coming soon).