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T
his is the newway of travelling: I want to visit
Slovenia, so I go to the Airbnb website to find
someone’s home to rent for the weekend. There
are 110 listings in the capital, Ljubljana. One of
them is “Jane’s apartment near city centre”, which costs
€47 per night. There’s a picture of Jane smiling inmirrored
sunglasses. She looks trustworthy. There are nine pictures of
her apartment. It looks good. There are 15 positive reviews
with accompanying profiles. I book it.
Next, I need activities. TripAdvisor has 469 recent
reviews of local attractions. Metelkova stands out. It’s a
former army base that became a squat and is now a
counter-culture hub. User Sillyinnervoice says to avoid it,
but Elaine1 gives it a top rating. I trust her. Sort of. I check
TravBuddy, TripWolf andWayfaring for more reviews and
pictures. It looks great. Where else to go?Maybe a local
could showme round? On TripTrotting I find a dozen
profiles of Ljubljana residents and click onNeza, who looks
friendly and says she likes culture. I wonder if any other
visitors have booked activities? I’ll check...
And so on and so on. This is how to create amodern
holiday. The travel industry is having a second internet-
induced revolution. While the first wave of travel-related
websites mostly centred around hotel and transport
bookings, or static ‘what-to-see’ guides, this time it’s
personal. More andmore of us are rejecting the old hotel-
and-guidebookmodel for our holidays, turning instead to
online travel networks where we can connect with fellow
travellers, whether that’s for advice, companionship or even
accommodation. We’re calling it ‘Holiday 2.0’.
Sparking the trend way back in 2000, TripAdvisor’s
crowdsourced guidebook, which allowed people to vent
about the best and worst of their experience, quickly became
a new travel bible. Since then, the sharing has gone from
opinions voiced in a virtual environment to actual spaces
in the real world. CouchSurfing, which started in 2004, for
example, provides over four-million registered users with
a platform to offer and find free accommodation; while
recent start-up TripTrotting is attracting a lot of attention for
using an algorithmdesigned by the developer behind the
eHarmony dating site tomatch travellers to each other for
face to face ‘meet-ups’.
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TRAVELLER