Entries about travellerspoint

You might have noticed a few mentions of a new planning tool recently and we are pleased to now share with you what we've created. The team have been coding, testing, and tweaking non-stop to make travel planning an easy and enjoyable experience (as it should be!).

The new Travel Planner allows you to keep all of your travel plans in the one place.

Rather than managing bookmarked webpages, favourited images, and a text file of well-researched notes, the planner is built around the Travel Plan bookmarklet to create a detailed personalised itinerary.

Below are some of the tool's main features:

Bookmarking

After adding the bookmarklet into your browser, you can use it to organise your online travel research in one handy place.

Using individual city stops on your trip plan, webpages are saved to the stop or destination they are relevant to.

A stop for pre-trip planning is automatically included when a trip is created so you can save important information like travel guides, insurance quotes, and packing lists.

New stops can be added to your trip through the bookmarklet or from the planner. You can even create a new trip directly from the bookmarklet, so you don't have to interrupt your online browsing.

It's the first time that I have seen an itinerary planner that I would use - Phil Lees, Tourism Victoria

Collaboration

To save problems arising later, travel companions can be invited to help plan your trip from the beginning.

Any plans you save will instantly be available to them. You can also add important notes to the bookmarks for them to see.

Transport

For a complete itinerary, you'll need to find transport between stops.

To that end, we've integrated results from travel search engine Rome2Rio to provide you with all the local transport options. Not only flights, but combinations of buses, trains, and driving directions.

Each option lists the travel times and distances involved, so you can make the choice that best suits you.

As a fan of Pinterest, I had been creating boards for different cities, and 'pinning' websites of tours, restaurants and activities to do in Europe. Now though, I can bookmark them to a specific destination on my itinerary. - Kelly McNamara, A Quarter, Two Dimes and a Penny

Map

The planner is integrated with our travel maps and automatically creates a map of your itinerary that can be shared with friends.

The mapping integration means you also have access to your personal travel stats.

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How To Guide

We've put together this step-by-step guide explaining the bookmarklet and how to use the planner. Have a look!

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Over To You

Our new tool is an ongoing project, so we'd love your feedback. Tell us what you think in our Forums, on our Facebook Page or on Twitter.

We have also included lots of little extras not mentioned here, so start planning your trip!

Happy travels!

The Travellerspoint Team

A recent question in the forums has raised the hot topic of travel map size.

Not usually ones for a travel brag, we thought we would take a quick peek inside the collective Travel Stats of the twenty most travelled members (by distance) and came up with some interesting statistics. Here are the ones we thought you'd like:

• The average number of trips taken was 125.3. That's a lot of airport check-ins!

Photo: jackcheng

• Together they have mapped trips to 206 countries and states.

• Our most travelled member by distance covered is ThoiryK with a whopping 3,504,676 km!! Phew!

ThoiryK's travel map

• The most popular countries were the United Kingdom and United States of America. Followed closely by China, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

• marcwiz is the only one to map trips to both Antarctica and Greenland.

The total distance travelled by all twenty members is roughly equivalent to 97.6 trips to the moon!

Want to see your own travel stats?

Simply make sure you've mapped a trip on Travellerspoint and head to your custom stats link.
Eg. http://www.travellerspoint.com/stats/username/. View your statistics for all travel or filter results for individual year or trip stats.

You can then brag to your friends and family via the social buttons! If you want to, of course.

Happy mapping!

We've been working out how to provide the most relevant accommodation search results for travellers. In the world of budget accommodation, we know not all hostels are created equal, or at least not equal for all backpackers. To this end, the team have put together some cool new features and we're excited to formally introduce them now...

The Price Slider helps you choose what is most important—low cost or top rated. For the best of both worlds, just leave the slider in the middle like this:

Map View is for when location matters: be it a conference, sporting event, or festival. Enter your preferred dates and the address or landmark you would like to stay near.

For example, if you wanted to see the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, your search would look like this:

Available properties will show on the map with a green marker and are listed in order of closest to your specified address. Any red markers indicate properties in the area that are not available during your selected dates.

Click your preferred property and the walk to your hostel will be mapped for you:

Use Quick Compare to search for a hotel based on the facilities available. We've chosen some common inclusions to begin but you can add or remove facilities as needed:

We are always looking to improve our site and its features, so we'd love to hear your feedback. Leave a comment below or tell us what you think by posting in our Forums.

Happy travels!

One of the best parts about joining a community is feeling part of the community, however, we admit most of our members will not have noticed our latest site feature.

We understand that joining a large and active community like Travellerspoint can be overwhelming for new members and this is why we have developed the Welcome Committee!

Photo by Marie-Jose

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
Henrik Ibsen

The Welcome Committee is a group of members committed to helping new users get the best out of Travellerspoint: from help finding the right guide info to understanding how to use the forums.

Some of our respected members have already been asked to join the Welcome Committee and have truly embraced the role. They have already helped more than 20 new members become familiar with the Travellerspoint site and in turn become active members themselves.

If you would like to join the Welcome Committee, please submit your details on the Committee page here.

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We are always looking to improve our site and its features, so we'd love to hear your feedback. Tell us what you think by posting in our Forums, Facebook Page or Twitter.

Happy travels!

The Travellerspoint Team

Our 2011 Community Survey is now complete and we have some interesting information about TP members we'd like to share with you.

First of all, congrats to Holly Clark (soupatrvlr) for being the randomly-selected winner of the iPod Touch! We think they're the perfect device to use while travelling and complement a brick phone nicely.

Image: Holly snapping a quick set-up pic

So, the first questions we asked were around "What kind of traveller are you?"

• 'Backpacker' was the most common response for type with 27% of you selecting it. This was followed by 'budget', 'mid-range' and the oh-so-cool 'I can't be categorised'!

• Nearly half of you liked having someone along while travelling, but just shy of the same weren't bothered either way.

• When it came to how often you travel, a whopping 61% replied a few times per year. The second largest response was once per year. Close to 10% were constantly travelling. What a life!

• In terms of dream destination, this was extremely varied but New Zealand, Bhutan and Switzerland got the most amount of repeated votes.

Image: What the dream destination pie chart looked like!

When it came to travel issues, we have quite a bit to report:

• Terrorism, natural disasters, infectious disease and special events were items most likely to influence your travel plans.

• When it came to considering the environment, the largest majority tried to limit air travel but there still a few who answered they didn't take it into account.

• In regards to how much of your travel you planned online, over half answered '75-100%'. Another quarter answered '50-75%'. We certainly have web lovers on our hands!

• 55% of you spent USD$1000-$5000 on travel a year, while almost 30% spent $5000-$15000. One person answered they spent more than $30,000 per year!

• And now for the most surprising part. We commonly hear digital media experts predict the death of the travel guide book but over half of you still buy one and take it with you!

We then wrapped up with some questions regarding the site and areas we can improve. Thanks so much for your responses – we're taking a look at all the feedback to see what we can do.

Overall, it's great to see you're loving the travel guides, blogging tools, photography, forums, trip mapping, helpers and accommodation. We're also flattered that 60% of you think Travellerspoint is up there with the best travel sites on the net!

Thanks again for taking part and we're looking forward to launching some fantastic new features and products (such as our mobile app) shortly.

~ The TP team