MyTripBook: Travel Journal With Hotel Booking
This is the first review in our series of travel applications that offer a journal. For an introduction to this category, including a rundown of features common to all four applications reviewed this week, please see: Travel Journals And Web 2.0.
There will be times when travelers will want to do more than just browse for destinations - the may want to book lodging as well. For this there is myTripBook, a travel application that combines the details of your trip with a travel booking engine that covers not only hotels, but hostels.
With myTripBook users can add their own trips, through a step by step process, leading them through a Summary, Route, Photos, Diary, and their Recommendations. Users can then connect with other users as they browse (or search for) other trips. Each user has a profile, can exchange messages, and can connect with other users as friends.
The most established feature of myTripBook is not the social or trip feature, though. It’s the ability to book lodging, which it handles the way it handles the trip information, by city. Hotel recommendations in myTripBook tend to be in the mid- to upper-range of pricing, but every hotel is rated and opens to an information page with a Google map. Hostels are not rated, but are bookable in a similar way, but unlike the hotels, hostels show availability and price differences (private vs. shared rooms).
The problems with myTripBook largely center around navigation and use, which is rife with the minute pitfalls of poor design; diaries, recommendations, and trip details are spread across several screens, users are forced to fill out city fields across several pages, even when it’s the same trip. Autofilled suggestions may not be what the user wants to enter, yet users must enter something from the suggestion field. Small annoyances, to be sure, but repeated as they are, it casts a long shadow across the benefit of booking lodging.
MyTripBook is a way for users to find other travelers, discover new destinations, and book lodging. To find this or similar travel applications, there is the Listio search: travel+share.
Previously in this series: Travel Journals And Web 2.0
Next in this series: MyLifeofTravel: Blog As Travel Journal
Application: myTripBookListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/myTripBook/
Website: http://www.mytripbook.com
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Tags: find, journal, photos, share, Travel
Posted in: Travel Journal | Respond
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May 19th, 2009 at 3:57 am
This is James from myTripBook. Thanks very much for this objective review of the site, it certainly gave us a lot to think about regarding site navigation and usability. Following your comments we have changed the way quite a few things on the site work- the edit trip functions have become more intuitive and easier to follow and the biggest change is that we are now using Google Maps geocoding rather than our own database, which means that people using the site are no longer forced to choose from our suggestions for placenames but can enter what they want. People can now log into the site using their Facebook account and with their permission, all the trip info goes through the Facebook newsfeed- such as the dates and destinations for your trip. Thanks for all your valuable feedback! James