From the swivellin' chair...

When Peter posted in our forum last month about the launch of several new features and additions to our budget accommodation area, it was an exciting day for us. There's often several months of work and testing behind the larger announcements, and this one was no exception. Amongst several more common features such as reviews/ratings/mapped properties, we also launched something we believe is quite unique and specially of interest to members of a community like Travellerspoint. I thought I'd highlight that something, which we're calling Social Bookings, in this blog post.

Here's how Peter described it in the forum:

See if other Travellerspoint members are staying there!. If another Travellerspoint member has booked the same property for the dates you are searching, you will see a note saying that "another Travellerspoint member is staying here on these dates". If you are the social type and are interested in hooking up with other Travellerspoint members while travelling, this might sway you to choose a different place to stay. I'm calling this "Social Booking". Once you have made the booking, you will be able to see what members are staying at the same place and be able to get in touch with them via Travellerspoint.

Peter's description is a good one but with something so unique, I thought it would be a good idea to take a more practical approach and walk through some of the steps involved with this.

The idea
Social bookings is a concept tailored towards independent travellers, much like those who in the past years have posted thousands of requests on our Travel Companions forum to meet up with other travellers heading to the same destination on the same dates. Anyone who spends time on any of the more active travel forums will know that there are literally millions of posts like this made. Backpackers setting off on a gap year to Australia for example can consider this an alternative to a group departure if they are nervous about not meeting anyone at the hostel on the first few nights. This isn't for every traveller and we're well aware of that, however we're convinced there's a large group of travellers who are going to absolutely love this feature!

How it works
Whilst browsing the budget accommodation area (which includes hostels, budget hotels, guesthouses etc), you will see properties where other Travellerspoint members are staying on the same days.

~ here it appears that on 5-7 January there is 1 other Travellerspoint member staying at the Flying Pig hostel in Amsterdam and it's pretty well rated/priced as well.

Let's have a closer look by expanding this listing:

If you'd like to know what kind of rooms they have available and at what prices each come, click on the name to take to you to this:

~ hey look, this place now has 2 other members staying there on these nights; it must be popular!

Let's say you decide that this looks like an awesome place to stay in Amsterdam (which it is by the way!) and you proceed to make a booking. You'll be presented with a few short details you have to enter to book and at this stage will be asked if you would like to "Allow other Travellerspoint members to see you are staying here". As you can see, this is an opt-in feature only. It's completely up to you if you want to participate in this, don't tick the box and no-one will ever know any different.

At this stage, you still haven't actually gotten the details of which members are booked at the property and not until finalizing your booking does this information appear on your confirmation.

In this case both members are showing as being online (light green) and both have a full name filled in, but that's a choice that individual members make when signing up. You can choose to have a look at their profiles and see if this is the kind of traveller you'd like to hang out with based on that, or you can just send them a message directly through Travellerspoint. There's an option immediately below the names to undo your choice of having your name show up and you can unlist like this at any time through your booking confirmation page (which is emailed to you just in case you forget it of course).

This feature is currently in beta while we expand on some of the other functions (like getting even more properties mapped!), but works like a charm *already*. Only Travellerspoint members have access to the Social Bookings feature, but of course anyone can place a booking at any time without being a Travellerspoint member!!

Please let us know what you think of the feature either in the comments below or via private message to Peter or myself.

A couple of weeks ago Flickr, a popular photo sharing site some of you may have heard of , launched the ability for some of their users to upload videos. It's been a long time coming, but they did do something surprising to many by limiting the length of the videos to 90 seconds. Here's their explanation melted down into once sentence:

90 seconds? .... the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

I like that quote and 90 seconds is exactly the kind of length a lot of travellers are shooting. With the Flickr video player being the best looking one out there, and seeing as we already offer the ability to embed videos from YouTube, iFilm, Travelistic and Fliqz, we felt it would be remiss of us not to allow for embedding Flickr videos as well. So, as of today this is available to all of you blogging your travels here on Travellerspoint. Just click on the video button when creating an entry and select Flickr from the dropdown to get started - it's that easy!

For kicks, here's a Flickr video I liked:

jl98584 has done a great post outlining in detail how to insert a photo from Flickr directly into your Travellerspoint blog entry. For any of you that don't want to upload photos to multiple sites, but still want all the great functionality (moblogging, interactive maps, video, Feedburner and Google Analytics tie-ins, yes you can even make money off your blog!) that comes with a Travellerspoint blog, this is a great way to go.

Although the instructions are specific to Flickr, in principle they should work for any other site that hosts your photos, including Facebook, MySpace, SmugMug etc. Just include the links to your photos in the IMG tag and you'll be set!

It's not every day you get to do a post based on how good something is that you've spent a lot of time and energy on, so I should really cherish the moment... okay, now that the moment's gone, I'd like to thank Josh from Izunotravel.com for the really in depth review he's done of travel blogging systems. For those of you familiar with Travellerspoint blogs it might come as a shock, but there really are other sites out there trying to do the same thing! We don't know why they try either, but hey...

Joking aside, it's great to see a blogger/reviewer really go into the kind of detail Josh has done when researching 10 different sites that offer travel blogging - view the review here. And this was done independently too I should add; the first I ever heard about it was an email from Josh letting us know we had 'won' We went up against some pretty big names, including a few sites that do nothing but travel blogging and I'm really proud to say that Travellerspoint came out number 1 overall. We were considered best in category in three different categories out of 15, although not all 15 categories actually had a 'best of category' (only 7 did). My favourite line is this one:

Quoting izunotravel.com

"Map features are better than on Google"

There's a lot to take away from the review, including some (small) points of improvement for Travellerspoint which is also very welcome. If you'd like to see the comparison chart (flash), the direct link is http://www.izunotravel.com/Customs/traveljournalreview.html

And as always, any ideas/suggestions on how we can keep on making the travel blogging system better are welcome!!

It's been a while since adding a new language to the travel blogging area, but considering the number of Scandinavian bloggers that are active, today's addition of Danish should be welcome to many! A big thanks to Andreas who is currently blogging about his travels for providing the translation. As with past translations, this is especially of benefit to your readers if you were writing in another language anyway. Now the labels and default text will all be translated to match your writing.

You can set the language for your blog in the settings part of your travel blog management area. These instructions should help if you are unsure. The only difference should be that you need to select Danish from the drop down list instead of 'German'

Don't have a travel blog yet?

Please contact us or send me a PM if you want to help us translate to other languages than the ones currently available. We're offering increased photo upload limits in return. You can get a whopping 200 MB a month.... that should tie over even the most fanatic photo uploader.