How To Tell A Good Travel Site From A Commercial One
A travel website is meant to give you valuable information related to your travel planning and inform you of your options. It is meant to help you make a decision when it comes to choosing a destination, fixing a budget and making important choices like where to stay and what to see. But even such basic information is hard to get these days because most of the big sites are so very commercialized; it is simply not worth losing your mind over the overflow of data that they provide.
Most of that information is promotional material for which the sites get paid. What do I mean by that? Well, here’s an example – you build a large travel website and people start visiting it for information and advice. Soon, local businesses at the destinations mentioned on the website want to advertise through your website. If they do it via the usual way, i.e., banners on the website, block ads on the side panels, then it is all fine and dandy. But what these people are really looking for are what the people of advertising calls ‘plugging’. Plugging is a cleverly designed piece of advertisement that is blended in to content that is not advertisement or does not look like advertisement.
So when you visit the website next and go to find a hotel in, say Honolulu, you see that the site lists regular hotels and rates a certain hotel highly. You think that the hotel is really good and book it. But when you get there, you realize that all the promises have been false and everything is really bad. This is what happens when a bad establishment gets good recommendation by paying a commercial website. The ultimate loser here is the traveler or the tourist who trusted that website. Sure, now that website has lost a loyal follower, but the damage has already been done.
Thankfully there are websites that are not really commercial in nature. They are akin to smaller concerns, which run by people who are genuinely interested in helping people get to a place and have a good time staying there. These are usually people who are based in that area and hence know a lot about the place by personal experience. They are really the right people to go to for advice.
These people sometimes write blogs or have their own website that is full of accurate and up to date information. These websites may not look very professionally done or they may not full of gimmicky graphics and pictures, but these are the places where you get information that no other travel place can give you. You get little tips, larger list of places to go to, plus the point of view of someone who really knows what he is talking about.
That is what a good travel should be giving you but commercial sites put up half-truths and whole lies instead just to get paid. And most of the user reviews are fake. So when it is time to plan your next trip, you know which sites will serve you better.
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