Yelp is a vacationer’s best friend – Dining out tip

by Gadling Staff on

Want to find the best restaurants while on vacation? Not only will Yelp help you find which restaurants are nearby, it also provides user reviews for each restaurant, so you really know what you might be getting into before you arrive at the establishment. The site also includes nifty, useful filtering options, so you can zero in on exactly what you need.

No access to a computer? No worries. Yelp also comes in several mobile flavors, including for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android-based smartphones like the Motorola Droid.

Visit the Yelp website and see for yourself.

UpTake takes the pain out of finding the best travel reviews

by Scott Carmichael on

The travel world is “blessed” with quite a few review sites. In recent years, millions of reviews have been added to sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Fodors and more.

Of course, this means that it can be hard to find the best place for an honest review, or a site with enough reviews to help you make the right choice.

Enter UpTake – this service takes reviews from all those sources, and displays them on their own easy to use site.

They cover it all – hotels, restaurants, activities and even shops, spas and beaches. In total, UpTake claims to provide access to over 20 Million reviews.

The site itself is a breeze to use, and since everyone has a different preference for how they search, you can access reviews and recommendations in several ways. The easiest is of course to just enter your keywords. Thankfully, the site lets you find stuff with plain English queries. You can also browse by state, activity and even by theme (romantic, budget friendly, girls getaway, pet friendly, family friendly and “just get away”).

Search results are presented in a very easy to use format. The information shows you a brief summary of recent reviews, any available ratings, a map of the location, the most recent price of the location and even a list of other things to do in the area.

Once you get a list of places based on your search, you can narrow the results down by changing the price, type of amenities and theme. The results update “live” based on these requirements, making it really easy to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for.

For example, check out their page for the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago. As you can see, you get a great amount of information, with everything from the number of rooms to the year the hotel was built, as well as links to most review sites.

Hotels can be booked directly on the site, and UpTake even takes the hassle out of finding the cheapest rate by providing prices from multiple booking sites.

The “themes” section on UpTake is equally impressive – once again, you can search by keyword (“Pet friendly things in Seattle“) or by clicking on the themes buttons on the main page.

What I really like about the themed search results is that they gather information from appropriate sites. For example; pet friendly destinations uses reviews from DogFriendly.com.

Finally, the UpTake Vacations section allows you to do one-stop-shopping for planning your vacation. You’ll find hotel recommendations, but also links to attractions and other activities. Of course, all these destinations link to the specific UpTake review page.

All in all I’m quite impressed with the site – it offers a massive amount of information, but the tools make it really easy to find things, and unlike some other review sites, you only really get the information you need, without making the results overly complicated or hard to read.

The site is technically still in “Beta”, but I did not come across anything that did not work correctly. That said, there are one or two things I would have liked to see added – with so much information, it is hard to keep track of the things you looked at. Unfortunately, UpTake does not provide a way to easily save your results. In an ideal world, you’d be able to add search results to a “virtual suitcase”, making it easier to plan your trip and do some true comparison shopping.

The Onion launches Decider cityguides

by Scott Carmichael on

The Onion has just joined the long lineup of online city guides with their newest publication; Decider. Decider launched in beta mode with a guide for Chicago and covers everything from movie reviews to restaurant guides. If you visit the site expecting the usual amount of Onion humor, you’ll be disappointed. The Decider is actually a serious site, with real reviews.

Of course, starting in Chicago is quite a challenge as they will be up against established sites like Metromix, Yelp and Citysearch. The advantage for the Onion is that they already have a large pool of journalists to use, and thousands of fans of their other work who might be interested in seeing how interesting an Onion publication is without satire.

The site currently lists over 5700 restaurants, but the vast majority have not yet been rated by readers, and I doubt that many people will be willing to sit down and post their reviews on this site if they already feel comfortable posting to Yelp or Metromix.

The site is also missing mobile access which is something they’ll need to get up and running as soon as they can. Yelp already has a GPS enabled version of their site for the iPhone. Then again, the only mobile version on Citysearch is for Mobile,AL. The ability to search for a restaurant or store on the go is something that can make or break a site.

I’m sure that the guide will improve over time, but I can’t help feel that it’s all just a little more of the same. There is nothing really new on the site and it’ll take a lot of user submitted reviews to become a truly useful resource.

Sense Networks can show you around town with Citysense

by Justin Glow on

Have you ever, upon arriving in a new city, wandered aimlessly in search of a popular place to eat or drink? Of course you have.

A new mobile company, Sense Networks, promises to make this much easier in the future with a new, somewhat creepy/bizarre cell phone application called Citysense that supernaturally senses the information emitted by cell phones and displays the results as a heat map on your own miniature screen (right).

The blotches of red represent large groups of people in a particular location, assuming most of them have cell phones. That data is then cross referenced with Yelp and Google Maps to provide information on what is actually at that location. So popular events, restaurants, or nightclubs are easily spotted and displayed along with their pertinent information.

Currently the service is being publicly tested with BlackBerry users in San Francisco only, with plans to support the iPhone and extend to other major U.S. metro areas in the near future.

For more information, visit Tech Crunch’s article on the service, or head directly to Sense Network’s website.

The Frankenguide: Make your own DIY guidebook

by Justin Glow on

Whenever I travel somewhere new, instead of dropping $30 on the newest Lonely Planet Wherever and lugging it around in my already-small pack, I’ll create what I call a “Frankenguide”: a mishmash, do-it-yourself collection of torn-out pages from an official guidebook, printed websites, Wikitravel guides, pages from history books, and anything else that might come in useful when I’m on the road. Bind it together with some staples or paper clips, toss it into a Zip-Lock bag, and off I go. It might not look pretty, but it gets the job done and is infinitely customizable. Here’s how you can make your own:

First start with the official guidebook. I usually go with Lonely Planet just because, but any guidebook will do — choose your favorite brand. But instead of buying a new one, I’ll opt for an older, dated model which costs a fraction of the price. The sections I pull out of the book for my Frankenguide are the timeless bits of information: historical backgrounds, landmark descriptions, stuff like that. All of the information that has an expiration date — hotel and hostel reviews, restaurant listings, and so on — stays in the Lonely Planet. Instead, I get this information from a variety of places that have less of a chance of being outdated. This means I don’t bring along Lonely Planet’s list of restaurants in San Francisco, for example, because I could easily hop on Yelp with my laptop (or the nearest Internet cafe) and figure it out as I go. Further, the guy working the newspaper stand is probably going to have a good idea of where to get the cheapest, best-tasting Dungeness crab in the area. Ask the locals.

Next I’ll go to WikiTravel and look up my destination. More often than not, there’s some extra information in the guide that I don’t really need. So instead of printing the entire thing and wasting countless sheets of paper, I’ll open up a new Word document (or whatever) and copy and paste the bits that I can use. This also allows me to format the text to suit my needs, and add pictures or maps as necessary. You can also load a book template into Word so that you can maximize the space used on each sheet of paper. Print in two columns, front and back, and fold the pages in half, book-style. Pound in a few staples, and you’ve got yourself a decent little home-made guidebook.

The rest depends on your trip, and only limited by your imagination. If your trip to San Francisco is centered around exploring the hippie culture in Haight-Ashbury, for instance, fire up Google and find articles, websites, landmark descriptions, maps, and other information that will guide you. This neighborhood guide from the Chronicle would be perfect to include, for example. Throw in some conversion charts and a list of common phrases if you’re traveling internationally.

Your final product should end up being much cheaper and lighter than a new guidebook. Further, it’ll be completely relevant, and void of any unnecessary information. Now have at it!

The image above is the remains of Lonely Planet: South India after I pillaged its pages. Click to enlarge.