by Vas Mylko
This post is about looking into the past, to fish for the overlooked future — the overlooked future of travel. Timelapse of travel guides. It’s about evolution of travel technology for planning and doing best trips.
Travel Guides
First we got the books. Multiple printed travel guide books emerged approximately at the same time: Murray’s Handbooks, Baedekers, Black’s Guides, Ward Lock aka Red Guides, Cook’s Tourist’s Handbooks emerged after 1820. After 1910 more names emerged: Michelin Guide, Blue Guides. Then, after WWII, even more names, recognizable today: Fodor’s, Frommer’s, and later Lonely Planet.
We have studied the real books and digitized copies. Old guide books are beautiful. They were crafted with so cool tiny details. For a tourist, there was no backup channel to pick up information back then. Everything you had was a small juicy paper book. Like one geek from Canada told it to me a year ago — book was a mobile technology. You could take it into your pocket with you, and travel with it far away, based fully on it.
Go ahead to check out those digitized guide books on archive.org. Zoom in and flip the pages. The scan quality is good enough. There are many routes. Literally — many routes — from each city to each city, all hardcoded as final tours or as skeleton tours with degree of freedom for changes. Trips heavily relied on multi-modal transportation back then: steam boats, railway trains, horses.
Travel Atlases
We like people who travel on purpose. Different people have different interests, tastes, goals, characters. What’s common between all different travels? It’s visiting more places and destinations, from trip to trip. It’s seeing and doing favorite things at new places. We have studied diverse collection of atlases: commonly recognized places of interest, best of the best collections, wine yards, origins of symbols in modern cultures, new places, weird places, personal and hand-drawn maps.
Road Trips
Most scenic views are usually possible from a car; especially when driving along a coastline or through a mountain pass. You can pull over and go to an ad hoc vista point by feet to enjoy a view. High viaducts and hills overlooking the cities give nice views. Car travel gives flexibility, independence, comfort, joy. There is no “last mile” problem for a car. Tours and road trips started to emerge. Initially they were affordable to rich people. Then, a rise of road trips happened, when cars became cheaper.
Frommer’s and Lonely Planet stood out with best road trips. Frommer’s usually proposed 1 week and 2 week trips within a country or a region. Trip for families is proposed as a separate. Thus 3 for Italy. (Probably 10 day and 1 month could be found for some countries or regions). Lonely Planet packed 10x more road trips per book — 40 for Italy.
Digital Trips
Wikitravel emerged in early 2000s, forked to Wikivoyage in 2006 to continue ads free. Frommer’s and Lonely Planet made their content digital. Plenty of online search web sites and mobile apps emerged.
We are not listing modern trip planners here for two reasons. First — because they are not good enough (many are not good at all). It’s normal order of things, as mathematically speaking, the problem is one of Millenium Problems. Second — because there are so many of them. Also, none of them shows potential at the scale of Google travel planning.
In late 2016 Google Trips mobile app was released. Then Google Travel Guides were linked to the regular googling on the web. When you search for a city (e.g. Milan), pay attention to the infobox on the right. There will be an entry point to the Travel Guide. Click it and scroll down.
There are daily plans based on actual visits and ones written by Google. All multi-day plans are shown based on actual visits only. Is Google working on the multi-day trips? We’re working on the multi-day trips. Our trips will be most curious in given time and budget in any geography. Our ingeeneers got The Challenge \m/
Our beta1 at curiosio.com solves the millenium problem of travel in one country in one click. So far without differentiation by themes or interests, but it’s on the roadmap. It’s not enough. The users want us to solve more: desired waypoints, automatic filling with other waypoints, experiences together with POIs, durations at destinations, bindings to dates, combination of countries, safety, and all that together must be optimized by time and budget. Research beta2 is available by invites. There is action video what it can. More to come.
Experiences
Experiences are important because of two reasons. First — they became affordable to not rich; from fine dining to adventures. Second — some are the wrappers around POIs. Travels don’t happen frequently enough, hence increasing a total trip price and a margin is a modern commercialization.
There are 8000 customizable tours by Evaneos. (Similarity to old Murray’s skeleton tours. Now it’s time to check out the first link to archive.org above, if you have skipped it). There is also TourRadar in personalized travel. There are huge inventories of one-size-fits-all tours & experiences by Viator, Klook, GetYourGuide, Peek, Musement.
Besides inter-city and intra-city trip plans Google is working on experiences. A fresh product from their experimental Area 120 is called Touring Bird. It helps to explore, compare and book experiences — all in a single city. As of today — only in 20 cities.
Another behemoth in the industry is Airbnb. They got many experiences and their experiences are cool. Check out this Samurai Sword by “Kill Bill” artist. They have a Trips team. Here are excerpts from the job description for a software engineer in San Francisco:
“…Airbnb Trips launched in November 2016 with the ambitious goal of taking Airbnb to an end-to-end travel platform… Search and Itinerary to better support Airbnb’s vision of providing the entire trip to our guests… make Airbnb the only travel platform that our guests will ever need… search feature across all verticals (Homes, Lux, Trips)… Trips knowledge graph… features to make it easier for users to collaborate and coordinate their trips…”
Future Trips
What was a cutting-edge and luxury in the past, becomes a heritage and lifestyle in the future. Fine dining, fine arts, performances, golfing, meeting celebrities are going to intensify. Grand tours in a new or vintage Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Aston Martin, Jaguar is still an expensive experience today. While touring in a premium Audi, BWM, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Corvette, Tesla is affordable today, and will be significantly more affordable tomorrow. People will not give-up driving so quickly, the routine driving will shift and transform into one kind of experience. Curious trips in cool cars!
Driverless cars will cause big implications. For the future touring it will not matter so much what the medium of transportation is. It will be all programmable and plumbed smoothly between roads, rails, air, water, tubes, intra-city, inter-city. It’s called multi-modal transportation. We elaborated more in Touristportation After 2020.
Something will not change, something will change. Logistics and optimization will change to make planning & experiencing 100x more convenient & comfortable. Experience is what will matter a lot. Digital multi-player games-experinces will flourish. The amount of experience from your future trips will grow by orders of magnitude. Driven by your curiosity. Stay curious.
