Pre-register on Travesse - The Luxury Travel Club

Hello everyone,
We're launching an exciting new business in November: Travesse, the Luxury Travel Club

PRE-REGISTER NOW!

Travesse provides its members with exceptional offers on luxury travel. The best hotels, city breaks and holidays from top travel brands are presented at discounts up to 70%.

Membership is by invitation only, however you may pre-register until 15 November. On registering, your name will be entered into our weekly prize draw for a luxury holiday. The lucky winners will be announced at our launch on 15 November.

Pre-register now at www.travesse.com!

 

New City Guides on TheTravelEditor.com

Many thanks to all of our travel writers who have helped us put together some fab new city guides and Top 10s over the last couple of weeks. They are in no particular order:

Singapore City Guide

Hong Kong City Guide

Tokyo City Guide

Normandy Travel Guide

South Africa Travel Guide with FIFA World Cup Football special articles

Oxford City Guide

Chicago City Guide

London’s Best Restaurants with a View

Best Drives in Europe

The Best Golf Courses around the World

Coming up: an updated London City Guide, reviews of castles in Poland and a Top 10 holiday spots in Sicily!

Have a great weekend.

The team @ TheTravelEditor.com

Villa Il Salviatino: A room with a view in Tuscany » Hotel Reviews » Florence - from The Travel Editor .com

Quick one guys. Our most fabulous Antonia Windsor is just back from Florence where she was lucky enough to review Villa Il Salviatino. She's beaten all the Nationals getting her review out there first on TheTravelEditor.com.

A stunning 15th century villa, this is no ordinary hotel. They literally treat you like royalty, starting by sending a private chauffeur-driven car to pick you up from anywhere in Italy. Owned by hotelier Marcello Pigozzo, Villa Il Salviatino is the result of 3 years of loving restoration and conversion and will open to the public in the next few weeks.

If you visit before May 31 2010, you will be able to have any available suite for the price of a deluxe room - that could be a massive saving of £3,500 a night.

Villa Il Salviatino - you saw it here first!

Hotel review of Villa Il Salviatino: A room with a view in Florence, Tuscany

TheTravelEditor loves Spring

Hello everyone,
Lovely spring weather we're having, isn't it? I've never seen the trees stay in blossom for so long. Apparently it's because the change from Winter to Spring happened as it should've done - slowly and without major temperature fluctuations. We'll see how long it lasts but for now, there's no need to head off to Spain for a Vitamin D hit.

Speaking of Spain, we've been joined by several new subeditors who have been diligently going through TheTravelEditor and making improvements. Check out our new and improved Madrid city guide with plenty of new articles about museums, parks and other great things to do in Spain's capital. One my my favourites is the Top 10 Photo Spots in Madrid.

Also, check out our much improved Paris City Guide, Cape Town City Guide, Barcelona City Guide (with new articles about Gaudi Architecture in Barcelona) and Dublin City Guide.

New on the site are a Tokyo City Guide, Hong Kong City Guide, the beginnings of a Golf Holiday Guide, and in preparation for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, we've done a great new South Africa Travel Guide, complete with hotel reviews and excursions from all of South Africa's FIFA host cities.

We'd also like to announce our partnership with Black Tomato, a wonderfully hip and cool travel agency who put together completely bespoke, inspirational and unique travel experiences. You'll see them as our booking partner all around the site, from safaris to honeymoons to New Zealand mega holidays. Welcome aboard guys and we're pleased to be working with you.

Next week we'll be talking about Facebook's new plans to take on Google by creating Web 3.0.

Happy travels,
TheTravelEditor.com

Social Media and Mobile – Fundamentally Changing Travel Forever

Social media and mobile technology are fundamentally changing the way we think about and experience travel, forever.

We used to ask our friends for recommendations, buy a guide book and do a bit of web research.

Now we just hop on a plane and wing it (sorry, bad pun).

We live in an interconnected age: people around the world can engage with bloggers in Iran, protesters in Tibet can MMS videos direct to the media, and, more mundanely, I can tweet pictures of my son building a sandcastle.

We’ve become used to having our friends on tap on Facebook and Skype. Our lives have become reduced to a stream of 140 characters. But that’s OK.

We’re at the forefront of a mega trend on the web - people’s online attention spans are getting shorter. We can access anything we want, anytime, anywhere. Call us the iPhone Generation or the Facebook Generation, whatever you like. We expect instant response, social interaction and relevance.

Perhaps as a result, online travel reviews are getting shorter. But I don’t think this is indicative at all of travellers’ declining interest in learning about foreign countries. On the contrary, I believe we travellers are more curious than ever, more adventurous, more open-minded. It’s just that we are using different media to acquire knowledge in different size chunks to a different schedule.

But with information nirvana comes chaos. How do we sort through it all? By using all this wondrous new webby social technology stuff to ask that age old question – Can you recommend a good bar?

Using social media, I can simply ask my real friends, or my extended social network ‘friends’, in real time.  Or I can do a quick search on a website I trust. In either case, I get an immediate response that is relevant to me.

Perhaps I didn’t need to buy that guidebook after all?

This is really appealing. For me reading a guide book has always been a bit of a let down. The Lonely Planet guys beat me to it – there’s nothing left to discover. I know that’s not true really, but it’s still a feeling I get.

But who do we trust? It used to be the people closest to us. But now, thanks to social media, it can be anyone. Our Twitter followers are asking our travel writers for bar recommendations in Rio…..while they’re walking down the street in Rio! How cool is that? 

So, travel websites need to build immediacy, interaction and relevance into their online experiences. Websites like The Travel Editor and TripBod are doing just this by pooling together groups of experts into a vibrant community full of travel knowledge which travellers can tap into.

Mobile will also play a very important role in our travelling future. I’m very interested to see how the iPhone apps put out by some of the guidebooks will fare. They require people to download the app in advance, and in some cases buy the electronic guidebook to go along with it. Playing devil’s advocate, won’t people prefer to wait until they’ve arrived and then ask people they trust for recommendations?

Travel & Technology Roundup - Week 38, 2009

Hello all,
Apologies for the long time between posts. The market seems to be picking up again and we at TheTravelEditor.com have been very busy indeed. This is a good thing.

There have been loads of things going on in tech and travel.

Nokia buys travel social network Dopplr....then weeks later there are rumours they want to sell it. What is going on here? Techcrunch believes Nokia wanted the management team (many of them former Nokians) but not really the business. Any buyers out there? Actually, we may want to give Nokia a call.....

You heard it here first: Time Out launches city guide ebooks. There are 54 titles in Time Out’s City Guide series, with Paris the first guide to be developed as an ebook and London, Venice, Barcelona, New York and Cape Town in the coming weeks. No link unfortunately.

New adventure travel company, Kumutu, appeared on our radar screen. Kumutu aggregate and promote adventure travel destinations and tours. Adventure tour operators can register for free and be added to Kumutu's GDS system. A new company, they've done a good job so far with 400 tour operators already in their system.

Our friends at Spot Cool Stuff have listed 5 Amazing Towns on Perilous Cliff Sides. I won't give the game away, but they're all in Europe except for one. The photos are absolutely stunning. A must read article from this super cool website.

Finally, here's a round up of what's been happening at TheTravelEditor.com:

New Israel Travel Guide launches today! It's still a work in progress, but we've got some of our best writers on the case to make it even better. Special thanks to Anthea Gerrie for so diligently churning out article after article these past few months.

We've also launched a New York City Guide....now everyone knows New York, like London, is a tough one to do properly. We've had a go and have enough New York restaurant and hotel reviews for at least a good ol' weekend of shopping, food and booze. Any writers out there who want to contribute please get in touch with us.

But we're especially excited about It's a Wild World, our ecotourism and wildlife travel section. Edited by wildlife journalist, Ron Toft, this section really brings wildlife tourism to the fore and shows us that it's not just for geeky birdwatching enthusiasts, but for all of us. And in this day and age of environmental peril, we think everyone should read these articles to help remind us what is at stake, and maybe awaken the hidden activist in all of us.

Other great features include:
* The Best European Christmas Markets
* Top 10 Christmas Gift Travel Gadgets recommended by The Kitmaster
* Newly redesigned Weekend Breaks section, including weekend breaks in England, Scotland, Paris, France, Eastern and Western Europe.
* Coming soon...a new mini guide to Philadelphia. Stay tuned.

Happy travels.
Kevin