Hello TPers!
I have a trip coming up relatively soon. I found this website and saw that it helps people organize their trips and vacations. I love to travel so I recently made an account. However, I'm the sort of person that's weary to trust a website quickly, especially if I'm to depend on it for planning out future trips. I usually like to learn of a website's credibility first and learn of the positive resources it provides, and most importantly, reasons to use it. So I thought it would be wise to ask people who have used TravellersPoint in the past and have had good experiences with it.
(Full disclosure: Between 10 and 5 years ago, I helped out as a a freelancer with some of the programming behind the site, and because of that know the people running the site, so I'm not what you'd call very impartial. The below is my personal non-affiliated opinion, though, as is the opinion I had when I first started working for Travellerspoint, halfway through my backpacking trip through Australia: "Wow, I wish I'd known about this place when I first started out travelling!")
Besides hanging around to help people and get to waffle about my favorite destinations to people who actually are appreciative of it, I personally use travellerspoint mostly for inspiration (browsing the photos in the community section and reading many threads on the forum), initial research (the wiki articles in the travel guide, plus asking questions here on the forum when I have specific things I want advice on), and accommodation booking (when staying in hostels, where travellerspoint's selection is huge - they're also doing decent for hotels after a recent update, but I haven't yet found a match for the trips I've taken since).
To start with that last, I use the accommodation section because I have personal trust in it (having audited a previous incarnation of the code) , and because I find the concept of "trusted reviews" to hit exactly the sweet spot; and even more so when those reviews are left by forum regulars who I know by name (and sometimes in person from one of our infrequent meet-ups). I've also seen how (the main admin) responds in those infrequent cases where someone posts on the forum about a booking gone wrong: They always go above and beyond to make it right (which mostly involves pointing accommodation providers to their obligations). I've never had anything go wrong myself, but having seen how it's handled helps take away a potential worry.
The guide is useful as a starting point, but I mostly use it as a counterpoint for wikivoyage, to just get a different take on things.
Finally the forum is my home away from home (see my postcount) , and although it's definitely not equally strong in providing information for all parts of the world, it just has a very friendly and useful vibe. There's always exceptions, of course, but generally I find that new members have their questions answered usefully and in a friendly manner, rather than (as seen on so many other forums) being pointed to the FAQ and ridiculed for it.
I don't personally use other tools like the blogs and travel map, but do know that they're very popular with many people due to their degree of customization. Also, travellerspoint is small enough that when people give thought out feedback on how such tools could be even better for them, that tends to be responded to very well, and although not all feature requests are actually incorporated, a surprisingly large percentage of them are, and frequently very swiftly.
I hope that helps. Welcome to travellerspoint, and I hope you'll stick around!
[ 24-Feb-2015, at 14:24 by Sander ]
Hi Monica,
I'm one of the founders - my brother Sam and I started the site almost 13 years ago now. I'll let others explain how it's useful to them as I'm obviously partial. But if you have any specific concerns, feel free to get in touch.
Peter
Hi,
First I can tell a few words about my profile. There’s almost 30 years I started travelling through the world as soon I got a good job situation with no real money issue. Just to explain that I was looking for a site to track my old travels rather than getting tips for an upcoming one. That’s said I can explain what I like in TP site.
- Travels maps: this is the main reason I joined the community beginning of 2014. Sometimes tricky to handle, I consider as a game to place correctly the stops on the map and manage the homonym locations. There is still some place for improvement but Peter really does a great job.
- Photos: I do not use TP as my main place to share photos (I use Google+), but I select some for geotagging on the maps and I like to see nice featured pictures from everywhere on Earth.
- Travel guides: there are really nice short guides with permanent enrichment. So far I have never used the accomodation proposals but why not in the future.
- Forum: Spams are very quickly removed. Generally there’s at least one answer for any kind of request from 1st time traveler or from experienced one with very precise question. As non-native English speaker I sometimes miss some jokes, some abbreviations or some English culture references but I do not care. Thanks to the forum I still discovered some very nice place to visit which I never heard before, in my own region, in south of France. And I find there is very good spirit into the community.
- Last words about the blogs: I am not a blogger and I am not really interested in blogging but I know some people do really cool things.
So up to you to join.
Alain
[ 25-Feb-2015, at 02:12 by Alain13 ]
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