Travel Wikis
Michael Arrington's Techcrunch blog yesterday brought up the topic of wikis for travelers. It seems there is yet another travel wiki gearing up to join the ranks of user-generated travel content websites. It's funny, when we first conceived the idea of OTR, wikis were just becoming popular. We briefly considered it: makes for a nice, low-cost model with constantly updated content. The big obstacle that I couldn't get my head around, which was already starting to plague sites like Tripadvisor, was how to prevent biased opinions, or worse, people who will unjustly tout their own places and bash their competitors. Without editorial control, these 'travel tips' are relatively useless to me and I certainly wouldn't base my travel plans on them. Not to mention another big problem -- you never know if the 'recommendee' is the same type of traveler you are.
These 'user-generated' models are great from a financial point of view -- there is virtually no cost to run them - but unfortunately the advice you get is as low in quality as it is in cost. That's why we went with a hybrid model - editorialized content that is enhanced by comments and suggestions from our invite-only member base.
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