Hey! Sebastian from tripwolf.com kindly gave me a bunch of invitations to their private beta.
I’ve tried it a couple of times and it’s interesting so far. They just introduced a cool feature (today actually) : You can drag and drop any destination name on the site (or any pin from the map) into your “scrapbook” on the left, then click “create pdf” and you get a really nicely designed guide to print out!
The invitations are here, hurry!!! : )
BTW, feel free to give your feedback over here, I’m curious to know what you think!
Here are the Webby nominees for Travel and Tourism categories.
Tourism
Sydney Wildlife World
http://www.sydneywildlifeworld.com
The Official Tourism New Zealand site for Destination New Zealand
http://www.newzealand.com/travel
Tourism Australia “Travel Australia”
http://travelaustralia.ninemsn.com
Vail Resorts: Resort Explorer
http://www.snow.com/resortexplorer
YellowstonePark.com
http://www.yellowstonepark.com
Travel
Expedia.com
http://www.expedia.com
Gods of Chinatown
http://gods.tenement.org
Kayak.com
http://www.kayak.com
TripAdvisor
http://www.tripadvisor.com
Wikitravel
http://wikitravel.org/
Congratulations to Evan (and friends!) from Wikitravel on their nomination… and good luck!
Today = A cold and a snowstorm in Quebec city.
Today + 31 days = Tapas and Xérès in Spain.
Wooouaaaaahhh!
I’ve sent an email to ollo@aircanada.ca to tell them about the language problem on their Comment Cards. It bounced. I’ve sent another one. It bounced another time.
Air Canada, où êtes-vous? (I hope you understand my question!)
Everyone knows that Air Canada is proud to serve their customers in English and French. Here’s what they’ve written on their Comment Cards.
“The choice is yours…
the pleasure to serve you is ours
Canada’s Official Languages
Air Canada is commited to offering you services in English and French. Should you have any questions or comments regarding our official languages services, contact us at OLLO@aircanada.ca or go to aircanada.com and click on Contact US / Linguistic Affairs.”
That’s funny to read, on the same card, an erroneous French translation for “Air Canada values your travel experience […]”. They’ve translated it into “Nous attachons beaucoup de prix à l’expérience que font nos clients[…]”. I won’t explain why it’s wrong to translate it like that, but trust me, it is. 
You can download the comment card here.
What’s also funny is that I write a post about translation, but I can’t even write English perfectly myself.
I’ve just realized that Beatrice Tarka (Mobissimo) was on Barenaked App: The Figure Behind the Top Web Apps panel today at 10am. It would have been a perfect opportunity to meet her.
Here are the slides.
Good job Evan. I think everyone in the room would have liked to listen to Evan for an hour or more but we only got 30 minutes. ; )
Actually, I thought it would be easy to have access to the Internet since it’s a geek event but it’s not the case. Most of the time port 80 is blocked so I can take my email but I can’t post. I should use a post by email kind of plugin… anyway. My favorite panel so far was “Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses” where Shanalyn Victor (Pixelgirl Shop), Ted Rheingold (Dogster), Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency) and Ryan Carson (Carson Systems) explained how the get revenues out of their small growing businesses, how this all started and how they deal with advertising, partnerships, affiliate programs, etc.
Evan Prodromou’s (Wikitravel) Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community That Pays the Billspanel is in an hour. I’m gonna be there for sure.
Actually, there are too many panels at the same time, it’s not always easy to choose!
Interesting read: Burst Online Insights - February 2007
Some quotes:
“One of the greatest impacts the Internet has had on consumer behavior is the planning and purchase of travel. The impact has been so great that researching or purchasing travel outside of the Internet is an unknown (and impossible to fathom) experience for many consumers. The rush of travel consumers to the Internet has led to an online travel marketplace estimated at $68 billion – and that is in the US only. Furthermore, in a new report from PhoCusWright Research, this year for the first time online transactions will account for over half of all U.S. travel bookings. To better understand the Internet’s impact on travel planning and purchasing, Burst recently surveyed over 2,100 web users 18 years and older who plan to travel in the next three months about their use of the web as a travel resource.
The Burst study focused on the use of the web as a travel research tool and a means to purchase travel products. The study found that four out of five (79.0%) respondents will use the Internet to plan their upcoming personal travel. There is no difference in the number of men (79.9%) or women (78.1%) who will use the Internet to plan their travel; and similar numbers of all age as well as income segments will use the Internet for trip planning.”
“Nearly Half Say Internet will be Primary Travel Planning Resource”
“Two Out of Three Will Research and Make a Travel Transaction”
