Nile Guide, the latest online travel site to launch, lets trip planners print out their own guide books, although its destination list at this stage is far from comprehensive.
The site itself is also limited – it only works with the latest version of Internet Explorer and Firefox. I could not access it on Firefox when it first launched this week and extracting information from it was as painful as getting baggage out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
But response times now seem to have picked up and there are some nifty features to explore.
As a Bay Area company, San Francisco and its surrounds are understandably well covered. I was most impressed with the way searches for places to stay and see could be quickly narrowed down on the fly.
Select the lodging tab for San Francisco and more than 600 hotels come up. Check a box for hip hotels and for a Union Square neighbourhood and the list narrows itself down to 19. Move a slider to five-star-rated hotels and you are down to the Ritz Carlton and Campton Place.
The user can then drag the hotel across to a trip planner column and use it to continue the search by finding places in close proximity. The right kind of nightlife can be pinned down with an “energy” slider control and walks can be judged with a “strenuousness” slider.
All the information found can be dragged into a set itinerary and printed out with photos for a personalised guidebook.
Nile Guide is missing a few elements. It could use an up-to-date listings service so that shows and other events could be added to an itinerary. It also lacks integration for flights, car hire and hotel bookings made on other sites.
This is something that longer-established site Tripit does very well: automatically aggregating all of your bookings for a trip into a printable itinerary and also incorporating information about your destination. Travel plans can be published as well to alert friends and fellow travellers that you may be in their area.
While Tripit is more practical, Nile Guide is prettier, as is Dopplr, another service that helps you to hook up with friends and frequent travellers.
Josh Steinitz, chief executive and co-founder, says Nile Guide has been in development for two years and partnerships for events listings are in the works, as well as more destinations than the 80 currently available.
Data sources are sites such as CitySearch, Expedia, OpenTable and TripAdvisor, supplemented by guidebook content, user ratings and a number of local experts checking the quality of entries.
Mr Steinitz himself has written about and photographed his visits to more than 50 countries and helped to build Away.com, later sold to Orbitz. Draper Richards and KPG Ventures are investors in Nile Guide, which is still a few stops and features short of a full itinerary.
