GuideGecko.com launches

by Brenda Yun on

Have you always wanted to write your own travel guide and market it yourself, in a way that is both profitable for you and useful to those interested in your travel savvy? Or are you heading to a single region of a country but don’t want to lug an entire country guidebook with you?

You’re in luck! No longer do you have to give out your travel tips (through Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Forum or WikiTravel) for free or carry the heavy guidebook that you only intend to use half of. If you’ve been slaving away at your own self-published travel guidebook or if you’ve been trying to find just the right guide to your destination, head over to GuideGecko.com and market your writing through its online shop and publishing platform.

A few months ago, GuideGecko‘s founder, Daniel Quadt, got in touch with me to get some advice on how to construct a website that would be both useful for travel writers with helpful insight and travelers seeking destination information. He and I spent a good hour on Skype (the sun was setting in Honolulu for me as it was rising in Singapore for him) discussing the best ways to make his innovative online travel resource benefitial for both parties.

Just a few weeks later, Quadt made some necessary tweaks and launched GuideGecko in late March. The result is a site that offers a variety of guidebooks — both mainstream and independently published.

The greatest part about GuideGecko’s collection is that you don’t have to be a well-known, published travel writer to submit your travel tips. As a member/user, you have the ability to upload, manage, market, and price your travel expertise as you see fit! Authors and publishers can offer their guides for download and as printed books. Guides can be updated at any time and customers will always get the latest version.

GuideGecko is an equally useful travel resource. It attracts customers with its large variety of guides, tailor-made search functionalities to help them find exactly the guides they need, and very competitive prices at up to 30% below the suggested retail price for commercially available guides.

The site already offers close to 2,000 guides on nearly 200 countries and 250 cities and regions around the world. The guides are classified into several categories that range from diving to dining, shopping to sightseeing, and trekking to traveling with children.

I encourage you to have a look at GuideGecko.com yourself. If you’re not completely satisfied, I’m sure Daniel is open to any kind of feedback or suggestion. In fact, I intend to interview Daniel on behalf of Gadling within the coming week to understand the inspiration behind GuideGecko as well as learn about his own travels, so stay tuned!

Gadling reads the Sunday travel sections

by Jeffrey White on

Haven’t had as much time this morning as usual to pore over the Sunday newspaper travel sections, but a few stories did catch my eye.

A few papers got the idea this weekend to run articles on train travel in the United States. In the New York Times, writer Andy Isaacson, a veteran of long distance international train travel, decides to cross the US on Amtrak and discovers, among other things, the unexpected sight of Amish travelers doing nearly the very same thing. The Dallas Morning News writes about a slightly less ambitious trip, taking Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer from Forth Worth to Oklahoma City.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch puts together a long feature on whale watching off the coast of Baja California. Now, this isn’t an original topic, to be sure, but writer Tom Uhlenbrock turns out what is a pretty exhaustive report, and provides plenty of nice detail that at times puts us right on these boats, feeling the spray of a gray whale.

With the economic crisis deepening, it seems that Wall Street has become something of a travel destination, an oddity, rather like how one might go and visit a former war zone. The Orange Country Register runs an Associated Press feature about a walk through the now shamed halls of American capitalism.

(And on a somewhat related note, the LA Times gives us this tour through Depression era art in San Francisco.)

On to a more convivial subject: the Boston Globe anticipates St. Patrick’s Day with this slide show of New England’s 10 best Irish Pubs (and I was psyched to see an old stomping ground of mine — the Snug in Hingham — make the list).

In terms of international travel, a piece of note is this one from Catherine Watson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Watson heads to Bahrain and winds through oil fields and dodges security guards in search of the Tree of Life.

The Financial Times has an interesting, first-hand report about taking a volunteer vacation in Kenya, where writer Michelle Jana Chan gives her time over to helping count elephants for the Earthwatch conservation project.

Easily the oddest travel story of the week belongs to the Wall Street Journal Europe’s weekend edition, with a dispatch from Patti McCracken on finger wrestling in the Alpine corners of Austria.

Lastly, for those who might have missed it, Slate ran a good series about a week ago on modern day St. Petersburg by writer Matthew Polly (and for one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on Russia’s second city, check out this dispatch by the Boston Globe‘s Tom Haines on the city’s 300th birthday back in 2002).

Lastly, wanted to give a quick shout out to a Prague friend, Evan Rail, a noted writer on food and beer, who has a piece in today’s New York Times on an East German shoe brand that is making something of a comeback these days.

A look at the Sunday travel sections

by Jeffrey White on

There’s quite a lot out there today if you’re trolling around the Sunday newspaper travel sections.

Anytime there is a new story from Tom Haines in the Boston Globe, you know it’s a good Sunday. Haines is simply the best travel writer working today in newspapers. In a typical dispatch, Haines writes from North Dakota — not an obvious travel destination, especially this time of year — weaving the theme of wind into a meditation not only on place and person but on environmental change as well.

The Globe also has a Q&A with Paul Theroux culled from a series of interviews the paper has done with the famed travel writer and novelist through the years.

The Washington Post might have this week’s must-read travel section. Ben Brazil has an interesting take on today’s El Salvador, once Central America’s no-go zone but now a good option for adventurous travelers. But the piece that really caught my eye was the section’s lead story: Staff travel writer Scott Vogel, often wasted on fluff pieces, files a report from Alabama’s Civil Rights trail, no doubt in honor of Black History Month. Such a piece could be formulaic, but Vogel’s isn’t. It’s got an almost Kuraltian pacing and is filled with the voices of locals, who pop up reliably throughout the narrative (it’s always nice when travel writers in newspapers actually decide to quote real people rather than their spouses).

Over at the LA Times, Susan Spano manages to write nearly 2,000 words about vacationing in the French Riviera without seeming to have spoken to a living soul, or at least one she deems worth introducing us to. Thus, a travel piece studded with the dreaded I, I, I….

The Miami Herald has mustered up its cruise gurus — IOW six people who have taken a lot of floating vacations — to answer your questions. This is probably a site you’d want to bookmark if there are some cruise issues you’re curious about.

A few travel sections this week decided to devote space to spring training baseball. The Chicago Tribune has a dispatch from a couple of stringers about the White Sox’s new spring training home in Arizona. The San Francisco Chronicle also dishes from Arizona, specifically Scottsdale, where the Giants and the A’s play in the offseason.

You’d expect the New Orleans Times-Picayune to be pretty much about one thing right now — Mardi Gras — and you’d be right. The paper’s consistently over-performing travel section has everything you might care to read about the city’s carnival craziness.

Lastly, the Philadelphia Inquirer has some good reads this weekend. William Ecenbarger gives us an essay about the various faux pas we commit as travelers without ever knowing it. And I liked this short dispatch from Emily Ward about Croatia’s unheralded wine country. It’s getting to be pretty close to the perfect time of year to head to the Croatian coast, and I have a soft spot for Croatian wine.

Gadling Take FIVE: Week of Dec. 16-Dec. 26

by Jamie Rhein on

Minutes after I wrote last week’s Gadling Take FIVE, giving a plug to Gadling’s newest blogger, Tom Johansmeyer, Kraig joined our mix of people who are wild about travel. Kraig Becker has been getting his feet wet this past week and is now not the newest blogger on the Gadling block.

Alison Brick joins us today. For any of you wondering if family travel influences children to travel, it did Alison. She has memories of searching out AAA hotel vacancies with her folks. If that doesn’t scare a person off from hitting the open road, nothing will.

Here are posts that caught my attention. They range from the serious to the whimsical.

  • Scott posted on a new rule that requires permanent U.S. residents who are green card holders to get fingerprinted upon entering the U.S. through an immigration check-point brought up an interesting question. Why?
  • If you’re heading to New York City, be prepared to pay more for a subway ride. The fare may go up. Jeffrey’s post tells just how much.
  • Aaron, who sniffs out controversy, and he’s such a nice guy, wrote a post on Burger King’s new ad campaign which has been called by some to be culturally insensitive. I’m with Aaron on this one.
  • Jeremy gives a thumbs up to the 2008 edition of The Best American Travel Writing.
  • If you’ve ever wondered where fruitcake comes from, check out Brenda’s post. She knows the scoop. Personally, I like fruitcake–all kinds.

If you’re traveling and bored, here are 4 pen and pencil games you can play. I’ve played them all.

2008’s best travel writing

by Jeremy Kressmann on

While browsing my local Barnes & Noble earlier this week, I stumbled upon a display of The Best American Series – a collection of books recapping the year’s best writing. Among the collection is a travel-themed edition, curated this year by travel “badboy” Anthony Bourdain.

Gadling has given great reviews to these anthologies in years past, so I decided to pick up a copy. As a fledgling travel writer myself, I’ve found the pieces in this year’s edition to be highly compelling. The featured content covers a surprisingly broad array of topics. Foodies will savor writer Bill Buford’s account of Extreme Chocolate, which finds the author deep in the rainforests of Brazil in search of the perfect cacao beans. Adventurers will want to dive into James Campbell’s look at the Kapa Kapa Trail, a grueling overland route of American soldiers fighting in Papua New Guinea during World War II, in Chasing Ghosts.

For anyone who’s interested in the travel genre, this is a great recap of this year’s best-written and most interesting stories. Travel writing is a well-worn style – pithy descriptions of swank hotels and delicious meals can only take you so far. It’s the stories that are able to rise above the cliches and well worn metaphors to truly give a sense of place and its people that truly does these locations justice.

Let’s continue to encourage this sort of high-quality travel writing. Stop by Barnes & Noble or hit up Amazon and pick yourself up a copy.