Searching for the best hotel deals in town is one topic we have discussed at length on MUO. We still like to put out the information now and again because hotel search engines are essential traveller tools to be used before you pack your suitcase.

Here are ten of the best hotel search engines that fetch you the best deals when you travel.

Google Hotel Finder

We start with the usual suspects and Google with its experimental Google Hotel Finder is one for the top billing. Head over to our directory mention for a brief introduction. Google Hotel Finder could go from an experiment to a full-scale assault on the other hotel and travel websites out there because it brings in a few conveniences. For instance, you can compare hotel prices (the price slider is a big help) and put them in a shortlist and track them over time. Tracking is a big help when you want to grab the best deal in town. You can use filters and the Google map to search out hotels in a selected area; select them by travel time; and pick the ones which are near the urban hot spots.

Bing Travel – Rate Indicator

Bing Travel goes head to head (or is it the other way around) with Google Hotel Finder. The Rate Indicator here is a great help when you are trying to find whether the hotel tariff is a good deal or not. You can also do a historic search for specific dates. It is only available for 30 U.S. cities at present. The Rate Indicator shows yellow, green, and red legends on a Bing Map to indicate the ‘hotness’ of a deal.  The usual Bing Travel search engine though gives you a comparative search with Hotwire, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Expedia, and Priceline. These are few of the top notch travel and hotel websites.

Hotels.com

Hotels.com is one of the most comprehensive hotel booking websites around which covers 140,000 hotels worldwide. It is a one-window solution to all your search and booking needs. It gives you localized information plus great deals and rewards programs. Hotels.com claims that it gives you the cheapest rates and if you find anything cheaper they will match it. Hotels.com also does not charge cancellation fees. Download their free iPad, iPhone, Android app.

Laterooms

This is a Europe and U.K centric site which covers properties worldwide too. Laterooms lists a total of 33,000 properties. Sign-up to receive best deals by email or periodically visit the Special Offers section on the site. The hotel search engine uncovers deals like – Extra special discounts; Added value extras; Free hotel nights; and package deals when you stay for more than one night.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor is one of the most well-known search engines for travel and hotel deals. We mentioned it when we saw 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel and it certainly deserves another mention here. The site suggests reviews and advice on hotels, resorts, flights, vacation rentals, vacation packages, travel guides, and lots more. One of the features you might use most often is the filter that lets you sort the hotels by the amenities on offer.

Booking.com

Hotel search and booking websites are usually choc-a-bloc with information. I like the relatively uncluttered layout of this hotel search engine which is also aided by the large and clear fonts that are used. You can use the search engine to locate and hotel reservations.  Their tag line says – 187,784 hotels in 163 countries worldwide. So, that’s quite a sweep. Subscribe to the email newsletter for flash deals.

Hotels Combined

Hotels Combined and its hotel search engine too covers the world. The site says that its Verified Reviews (a trademarked service) accepts and quantifies reviews from verified, paying customers only. The hotel search engine compares prices across a bunch of hotel pricing sites. You can view the list when you search for the best hotel by destination.

Hotwire

The discount travel site negotiates the best hotel deals (along with other travel related ones) and presents them to you as Hotwire Hot Rates. You can also use the site’s Tripwatcher tool to watch out for price drops. The results are compared with other sites like Expedia, Kayak, Tripadvisor, and Orbitz. Check out the site’s Planning Tools section for a few more travel aids which help you plan your trip.

Venere

104.000 hotels and listing of other accommodation types in more than 130 countries makes this best hotel search engine holds its own against the best of its ilk. Also includes Bed and Breakfasts and vacation rentals. The site gives you a colorful map-based search tool for finding out the best hotel deal in town.

Roomkey

Six of the largest hotel companies in the world (Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotel Group) collaborated to start up Roomkey.  The hotel search engine is specifically tailored for their clientele and aims to – offer travelers direct access to a broad network of hotels around the globe, provide accurate and comprehensive information, make it easy for travelers to discover what’s right for them. And in one word, the interface is superb.

These ten hotel search engines are at the forefront of the pack, and there are more of them. Most of the websites in the hotel search category are quite similar…offering a mix of hotel reservations, reviews, and great deals. Here are a few more you can throw into the mix:

• 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip
• How To Find & Reserve Right Hotels From Your Android Phone
• 10 Sites For Budget Travel & Backpacking Trips Across The World
• The Best Travel Deals Sites To Save Cash On Your Next Vacation
• The 10 Best Free International Travel Guide Websites

Having a few of these hotel search engines bookmarked helps you to cross-check the best deals and plan your trip with low overheads. Where are you planning to travel to next? Do you use any of these hotel search engines, or do you depend on your travel agent?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

So a cheap apartment in the suburbs might end up costing you more money than one in the city, if you end up needing to burn expensive fuel anytime you leave the house. Combine that cost with the hidden expenses of driving, from wear and tear on your car to the risk of an accident, and the advantages of walking become clear pretty quickly.

WalkScore helps you figure out how walkable any address is, helping you determine an important part of a given home’s value. It is a perfect tool to supplement any housing search. To quote their website:

Our vision is for every property listing to read: Beds: 3 Baths: 2 Walk Score: 84. We want to make it easy for people to evaluate walkability and transportation when choosing where to live.

This is an admirable goal. Walking increases quality of life, so why shouldn’t it be a key part of any housing search? We’ve shown you the top 5 apartment search sites already. WalkScore makes all of them better by focusing on one important factor. It officially works in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; other countries might work as well but not fully.

Checking Any Address

Head to WalkScore and enter an address. You’ll then see a map and a collection of results:

This is the main way you’ll use the site: doing research on any potential apartment or house you’re thinking about living in. You’ll see a run-down of nearby essentials, ranging from groceries to entertainment to schools. You’ll also see an overall score for the address, giving you a way to compare its walk-ability with other addresses.

Don’t have a particular address in mind? You can bring up a list of neighborhoods in just about any city.

This will give you an idea of areas you might want to check out during your housing search.

Another factor to consider: how will you be getting to work? Walk Score lets you calculate your commute time and how much it will cost. Whether you plan on driving, walking, biking or taking the bus, this tool covers it all.

Once you figure out your commute costs, you can calculate the overall costs of living in a particular place. There’s a built-in tool for doing this:

You can combine your rent and your commuting costs with this, giving you an idea of the hidden costs of a cheap, car-dependent home. Remember, living in the suburbs may seem cheaper, but the total cost of commuting and rent might add up to more. Using this tool lets you determine whether that’s true or not in your situation.

How Does It Work?

So how does this site calculate Walk Scores? Good question. The site’s creators explain:

The Walk Score algorithm awards points based on the distance to the closest amenity in each category. If the closest amenity in a category is within .25 miles (or .4 km), we assign the maximum number of points. The number of points declines as the distance approaches 1 mile (or 1.6 km) – no points are awarded for amenities further than 1 mile. Each category is weighted equally and the points are summed and normalized to yield a score from 0–100. The number of nearby amenities is the leading predictor of whether people walk.

This seems reasonable to me, and I’m finding the tool very useful. I want to hear from you guys, though. How walkable is the place where you live? Share scores below, along with any other sustainability tools I might not know about.

The Places theme for slideshows works best if you have traveled several different places and if your travel photos have been labeled by location. The latest versions of the iPhone and some other contemporary cameras now include a geotagging feature that embeds location coordinates for each of the photos you take.

Pro image applications like Aperture will show you the geotag info, which consists latitude, longitude, etc.

But luckily iPhoto will translate that info into a recognizable name like Coney Island, London, or Islands of Adventure. But even if your travel photos are not tagged, you can manually label them using iPhoto’s Places feature.

Labeling Photos

When you select a photo and then click on the Info button in the iPhoto menu bar, the Places tool will show geotag info for that photo. If your photos are not geotagged, you can simply select a collection of travel photos and add the information yourself, similar to how you add keywords to your images.

As you type the location name, iPhoto will list possible locations to choose from. It may even list popular resorts or tourist spots. After all your travel photos are labeled, you can click on Places in the Albums panel, and you will get a map with red pens dropped on places you have taken photos.

Organizing Travel Photos

If you have organized your travel photos into regular or smart albums, all need to do is create a new album, name it the title you want your slideshow to be (such as “Where We’ve Been”) and add to it selections from your travel photos. Sort the collected photos by date so that they are kept together in the album.

Create Slideshow

Now with your travel album selected, click the Create button in the toolbar and select Slideshow. iPhoto will set up a separate folder of your selected photos. Next, click the Themes button and select the Places theme.

iPhoto will process your photos and create location titles for each set of your travel photos. A titles effect will appear on a moving map, with the first photo of each section representing the location.

If the titles are not to your liking, no problem, you can actually edit them, and be specific as you like about the location. As with other slideshow themes, you can also move photos around and delete the ones that don’t fit. You can also go back to your travel photo albums and add more images to the slideshow folder. If your images are dated correctly, iPhoto should place added photos in the appropriate section. If not, simply move them to where they’re supposed to be.

If you don’t like the default theme music for your slideshow, simply change it. You can adjust other settings for your slideshow. However, the Places theme does not show all your photos one at a time. This theme will present 1-4 photos at time. You don’t have much control over this, except for the order they appear.

The Presentation

When you click the Play button, iPhoto presents graphic travel effect that moves across the map to the places where you took photos. As with other slideshows, you can export your project to show it off on a website, your mobile device, or big screen TV.

Let us know what you think of this slideshow project, and similar ones you’ve used. For other ideas about iPhoto, check out our articles here.

The flight search service is not a new one, it had been introduced back in September, and offers route and price comparisons for many US domestic flights, complete with booking links from the airlines themselves. This is not to be confused with the flight schedule service, which has been around since May, and offers information about non-stop routes around the world in 11 languages.

Until today, when performing a search such as “flights from Chicago to Las Vegas”, you were shown flight schedules in the regular search results, and had the option to choose “Flights” on the left-side toolbar to access the flight search service. It has now becomes even easier. In the next few days, you will notice that when you perform a search for one of the available routes, the results page will already include a table with the available flights, prices, etc.

If you can’t see this yet, don’t worry – Google, as usual, are announcing things as they roll, and you should see the feature in your search results within the next few days. Hopefully, this will be expanded to include worldwide flights soon, which will make it useful for a lot more people.

Source: Inside Search Google Blog

Image Credit: Shutterstock

But with all of the apps and information we have floating around today, feeling like a local in a strange place should be fairly easy, shouldn’t it? With the tips people leave on Foursquare, the photos they post to Instagram, and the general comments they make on Facebook and Twitter, finding a place you would enjoy should be as easy as cake – and now it is.

What Is Roamz?

Roamz (directory app) is a location-based app that helps you find out what is happening around you. It uses information from your favorite networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram and delivers personalized content about the places, events, and activities that are relevant to you.

The more you use Roamz, the smarter it gets. Once it sees the types of places you like to go and the types of activities you like to do, results will become all the more accurate and personalized.

Also, while you’re out experiencing all of these “Roamz moments”, you can share them with your Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare friends as well. And who knows, maybe they’ll be more inclined to join you while you’re out and about.

To view how the app’s makers have described their app, be sure to check out this short video:

Using Roamz

Once you install the Roamz app, you’ll be able to set it up to your liking. You can set the Roamz feed to display results near your current location, or select a custom location to view information about the places nearby.

Feeds are sorted based on distance from the place you choose, and contain photos and comments from other users who have been there.

You can also check out the Popular section, which displays shares by other users that are generating the most buzz. You can find interesting places without a Roamz account, but adding to the content will require a profile.

Roamz also lets you select your areas of interest to help improve results. There are ten categories in the Interests section, which you can opt to turn on or off, including College & Education, Shopping, Nightlife, Bars & Clubs, Restaurants & Food, etc.

When you want to share your thoughts about a place on Roamz, just hit the large Share button at the bottom-center of the app and you’ll be given the option of selecting the appropriate social channel for your content.

Conclusion

As many of you know, I’m really into geo-location applications for mobile devices. In my experience, I’ve found that mostly any app that acts to improve my experience when I visit a specific area is one that is worth checking out, and Roamz is one of those apps. More and more people are beginning to utilize geolocation apps in general, and we’re starting to see the next wave of companies coming along and using the data that’s being created for even more useful utilities.

What do you think of Roamz?  Do you know of any other alternatives, maybe also for the Android?

Backpackers as the name suggests, carry nothing more than what they can hoist on their shoulders. From hostels to dormitories, from camping out to eating street food, from washing your clothes in the sink to catching a bath in the stream, the backpacking jaunt is a test of the free spirit.

Are you a backpacker? If you are planning to backpack to some far corner of the world, check out these ten budget travel websites.

Backpacker

Backpacker.com is the online face of the magazine. The site is neatly divided into sections that look at destinations, gear, skills, nature etc. One of the more unique features of the site is that a lot of the direction waypoints carry GPS data. You can download the information to any GPS enabled device. Step-by-step guides help the backpacker plan out his trip in minute detail. Backpacking gear gets reviewed, and you can also use the cool interactive Gear Finder search tool to find retailers. The Skills section is a must read for both backpacking fitness and survival tips.

Backpack Forever

The site has a community feel to it as backpackers across the world share their travel stories and tips. In fact, you can also join in and help others discover some cool backpacking trails in your part of the world. The site gives you a chance to earn money (via ad-revenue) as you write about your first-hand backpacking experiences. Every backpacking story gets categorized and linked through a map, so that readers can discover them according to region and country.

The Backpacker

The site has a nice compact section for the beginner backpacker. Trails Database – a collection of user submitted reviews, and Trail Talk – the very active backpacking forum are good resources for the backpacking enthusiast. Also, check out the The Backpacker’s database of backpacking, camping, hiking, and outdoor gear reviews.

Trails.com

Trails.com is a backpackers and outdoorsman’s site with free and paid services. You can browse trails by kind of activity. You can search for trails on a large U.S. map. There is a complete section on travel with a map-based hotels, motels and lodging finder. Also, there’s an active discussion board on the site. Register and upload your own trail stories for other outdoor thrill seekers.

ExploGuide

If you are looking for off-the-beaten-track travel spots, then this site could give some hints. A neat Google Maps mashup narrows down most of them, and you could find some unknown locations (as I did in my own country). You can write your own alternative travel stories and meet other explorers through the site.

Gorp.com

The site covers 50,000 destinations worldwide. If you are looking for a short trip at the end of the week, the Weekender Guide could be the one for you. The Hiking, Camping, and Gear sections should cover most of your backpacking needs. The Practical Advice and Trips of The Month sections are a must read. If you are still unsure where to go, check out the Adventure Finder  and Quick Escapes pages which also connect you to travel deals.

Every Trail

Every Trail is again not a pure backpacking site, but it’s more about hitting the trail with geo-tagged user-generated travel content. You can seek out road trips along with sightseeing tours, sailing trips, hiking, cycling, flying, hang gliding, geocaching, skiing, kayaking trips and more across 80 countries around the world. You can download the mobile apps and map a route with GPS while on the go.

Travel Independent

I liked this page for two reasons – it is ad-free and the clutter freeness helps me get to the information which is arranged very simply. The site makes no bones about being a great site, but it is definitely an informative one. If you are looking to grab some backpacking information quickly, check this out. Also, the Links and Resources page are jumping points for more reading resources.

Adioso

Adioso (beta) is a search engine that can help you catch the cheapest flight from your point of origin to a landing spot for a backpacking trip. I haven’t tried out the price alert, but the search engine (though, in beta) works well enough to dig out cheap air fares. Interesting filters and graphs help to narrow down the lowest cost for each date. A search engine that looks out for travel deals is a must for a budget conscious backpacker.

Hostel Bookers

If you need a search engine for the best budget travel deals, then you also need a place to stay if you plan to backpack across the globe. The search engine and the Google Maps mashup help you find cheap hostels (and hotels) where you can put up. The currency displayed is in Euros and you can book through the site after comparing the deals available. The site offers a secure payment gateway, but do read the fine print when comparing hostels and booking through the site.

Of all the travel websites we have highlighted so far on MakeUseOf.com, the selection below could be of use to the budget conscious backpacker:

• 5 Ways To Save Money When You Are Travelling On Vacation
• Research, Plan, & Organize All Your Travel Information At TravelMuse
• 3 Ways To Take Advantage Of The Travel Network CouchSurfing
• 5 Ways To Save Money When You Are Travelling On Vacation
• The 10 Best Free International Travel Guide Websites

Is your backpack all packed up? Where do you plan to go? If you are a backpacking buff share your tips below in the comments.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

How would you like to be able to not only recall where you went on your trip, but see photos from different locations and notes you took about events that happened during that time? Well, thanks to GPS technology and everyone’s most trustworthy personal assistant, you can share your trip experience.

In this article, I’m going to show you an iPhone application that can help you do all of that and more. So the next time you take a trip somewhere, no matter how small, you can keep track of those moments you’ll want to remember.

What Is HipGeo?

HipGeo is “the most convenient way to track where you go, take photos, record the world around you, and tell the story about where you’ve been or traveled.” It provides families and groups of friends an easy way to automatically share a moment, event, or trip without sending that information out to the whole world.

HipGeo lets you know where your friends and loved ones are with auto-updates or at your request, and you can use it to share your location, a place, a route, or photos through its integration with Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and email.

HipGeo, as you might have guessed, utilized GPS tracking features to “follow” you around and keep track of the places you’ve been and things you’d like to share. Once you’ve been enough places, you can create a shareable trip to show your pictures and tell your story with an animated map and slide shows.

Using HipGeo

Once you’ve downloaded and installed HipGeo to your mobile device, you can utilize its “Places” mode to track the places you visit (but not your exact routes!). Its background running GPS app is supposed to help HipGeo get the information it needs while also preserving your phone’s battery life.

You can make and share comments and photos along your route, as well as create an automatic journal record of your day, keeping an accurate history of where you’ve been and what you’ve done, which is accessible through the “My Day” one-touch option, as well as via daily emails containing the previous day’s events.

HipGeo allows you to automatically share your location without much effort, or manually share places and routes with friends via SMS, email, Facebook, and Twitter. You can post a place, a travel, or your whole day if you like. Or, you can choose to keep your journeys private with HipGeo’s intuitive privacy controls. You can set your privacy level to “just me”, “just friends”, or “everyone”.

If you’re in the sharing mood, you can also create distribution lists for different groups. And you can easily invite friends from your phone’s address book, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

HipGeo is currently only available for iOS devices, but plans are in the works for Android, etc.

I’m a big fan of useful geolocation apps and I think HipGeo is definitely one of them. Whether you’re going on a hike, road trip, or even a pub crawl, you can utilize this app to both share the great moments that happen during your trip and look back at them later on. And if you simply need directions to a place you can’t remember how to get to, you can use it for that too.

What do you think of apps like HipGeo?

Gogobot is your complete travel companion. It is like having your own travel agent who is available 24/7. Their website allows you to seek advice from other members and plan out a complete trip. Their iPhone app allows you to make virtual postcards from anywhere in the world and view the trip you made on the computer. No matter what you are looking for in terms of traveling, Gogobot can oblige.

Registration

You can create an account in any number of ways with Gogobot. First, you can sign up through the iPhone application via Facebook, or by creating an account using your email address. If you would rather sign up through the website, you can use a Twitter, Facebook or email account.

Creating A Trip

To create a trip simply click the button towards the top of the screen called “Create a Trip Plan” and type in the location of your choosing. Once you select a location, you will see a new page with some of the more popular destinations in the location you just chose. If you see a place you like, simply click “add to trip.”

The site also has a search box that allows you to find places that are not listed on the recommended page. If a place you are looking for is not listed, fear not, because you can easily create a new place right from the website. Simply type in the name and click on the option to create a new place. The site will ask for some information about the place you are trying to create and then you will be all done.

Other people will be able to add this place to their trips as well.

While creating a trip if you cannot decide what to do or you have a question, you can jump right into the next great feature of the site called…

Get Advice

Gogobot is like a traveling social network, and a huge part of social networking is getting advice and recommendations from others. On Gogobot, you can pose a question about pretty much anything and about any place. Simply click the get advice tab at any time to ask a question. Enter the location where you need advice  and your question. You can choose to share your question with other social networks, or just put it on Gogobot.

You can also answer questions on Gogobot. If you look at a place and see an interesting question that you know the answer to, click the “Add a Comment Instead” button and enter your answer. If you have something in particular to recommend click the “Add Recommendation” button.

Reviews

Gogobot also offers user reviews. Users can rate a place 1-5 stars and leave a brief write-up on their experience.

Of course, you can also leave reviews on a place. Simply go to the page of a location and click the big green “Write a Review” button. A box will pop up asking you for a score of the place and brief description of your experience.

iPhone App

As I mentioned in the beginning, Gogobot also has an iPhone application that is designed to expand on the experience of the website. To get the app, head over to the App store and download it.

The application allows you to view the trips you’ve created on the computer. This way, while you are actually out on the trip, you can check all the things you planned to do.

The iPhone app also allows you to create and share custom postcards. Simply search for the place under the create tab and click on the name. The application will automatically bring up your iPhone camera for you to snap a picture that will be your postcard.

After you take the picture, you can choose from a number of effects to make your postcard pop. Click next and you can choose to rate the place, add it to the Gogobot gallery and share it on any of your linked social networks.

Conclusion

Gogobot is a great website and application that meets all of your travel and social networking needs. It allows you to seek advice from other travelers and completely plan your trip. With the addition of their new iPhone app, you can take your entire trip with you so you never miss a beat.

Have you tried traveling with Gogobot? Did you find any cool places? Let us know in the comments.

Image Source: Shutterstock

If you love movies and just want to travel to some of the beautiful places they showcase (it’s called movie tourism these days), hop on to these ten sites which are all about locations where movies where shot.

Where Was It Filmed (Beta)

What looks like a simple search engine for movie locations around the world is actually a user contributed website that helps you find movie locations. You can also contribute and earn points by your own inputs and also by approving the ones of the other contributors. You can also check out the alphabetical index on the site which is gradually being built up. As the screen shows, you get the location on a Google Map too.

Movie Locations

It touts itself as the ultimate travel guide to film locations around the world. Behind the business like façade, there’s quite a lot of data on with the site being constantly updated. The site is enriched by original location photographs, trivia, links and travel details. There’s also a world map which goes with it (screenshot above). You can browse through the site with the name of the movie or search with an actor’s name.

Movie Locations Guide

The almost similarly named site to the above one is not as rich, but it includes a few extras like the Google Earth mashup to see the location on the virtual globe, and a location quiz to jog your grey cells. The list of movies covered is not huge and the site doesn’t seem to be getting any updates. But it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

Film Maps

We have covered Filmmaps in our directory and it is certainly one of the more focused sites on movie tourism. The stats say that the site covers 4304 film locations from 1861 films. You can log-in with Facebook connect and add your own films. Check out Popular Locations, Featured Films, or drill down to locations by country. The last option could really help you plan out places to visit when you land in a foreign country as each country is again divided by the regions and the films shot there.

IMDb

We return to our old favorite when it comes to all things movies. There are other movie sites of course, but IMDb is like an encyclopedia. It helps that it has a search engine (go to the Advanced Search page) which lets you search for movie locations. IMDb also has a location matching link which shows you all the other movies that have been shot at a particular location.

Wikipedia

Search with Google with a movie’s title will usually turn up IMDb first and Wikipedia second. Many movies get a complete look through here and that includes detailed information on the locations used for a movie. You might have to do a bit of reading as sometimes the locations might not be plainly mentioned under a Wikipedia heading like ‘Production’. Check out the screenshot. I guess you know which film is being talked about there.

If you want to get a complete overview of movie locations that covers 100 years of set locations with data taken from IMDb, then check out this mashup – 100 Years of Set Locations – 2,001 Films Mapped.

Investigating famous film locations is great fun if you are a movie buff. It’s all the more so, if you happen to be a travel buff too. Are you one? Which are your favorite movie location spots? Have you ever deliberately planned out a trip that took you to one? Do let us know.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Essentially, Gowalla is now about building stories and about travel. Stories are built around your friends’ check-ins and behaviour, showing users when their friends have done something interesting together. Travel guides for top tourism spots have also evolved out of the check-in data in Gowalla. The result is that you want to use Gowalla to plan trips with friends and then to record them for your memories as you go.

Check-Ins Are Still There… Sort Of

Users can still let people know when they’ve visited a place – and are encouraged to by all means! All of your shared activities are used to build the stories with friends and travel guides for all.

On the Gowalla website or smartphone application, search for the “spot” you’re visiting and add a “highlight” about any aspect of the location, upload a photo, like the location or add the location to a list. These activities let people know what you think and where you’ve been.

If you’re a little over all these multiple check-ins, you can connect your Gowalla account with Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook so that you only have to check in once. Head to You > Settings to enable this cross-posting. However, it would be great to have the ability to cross-post the other way around as well. That is, from Facebook and Foursquare into Gowalla.

Stories

Instead of seeing a long stream of disconnected check-ins and photos you’ll now see these as a cluster of events, pieced together as a story. If a handful of your friends all went to the same event, you’ll see all of their check-ins and photos together as the one story, making it far more cohesive, interesting and readable. You’ll also see comments by friends of friends who were at the same events, making the story even more interesting and complete.

Travel Guides

Now, this is where all that information in Gowalla starts to really take shape. Travel guides are pieced together from all the public information on a venue, city or country.

If you check out the guides you’ll see the top cities grouped by country for convenience, so you can browse through them and do a virtual tour. Clicking on a city will show you top locations, recent photos, featured locations and more. It’s easy to click through to other practical traveler-focused information, such as nightlife, food venues and the best lists people have made featuring this city.

These travel guides are filled with real-life things that people have done, seen and recommended, so they’re great for getting an honest perspective on the place before you go. It’s definitely worth adding Gowalla to the list of places you’ll use to research destinations before or while you travel.

What do you think of Gowalla’s guides and stories? Let us know!