WapReview

Wikivoyage, which became part of Wikimedia Foundation in January 2013, is a wiki style worldwide online travel guide. Wikivoyage was created by a group of editors at the older, for profit travel site Wikitravel who were unhappy with that site's management. Because content at Wikitravel was created by the community and licensed under a Creative Commons license, Wikivoyage could legally copy or "fork" Wikitravel's content.

The site is organized as a travel guidebook with articales heirarchically organized by continent, country, regions of countries, cities and districts within cites. There are also articles about hotels, restaurants, parks, festivals and other attractions as well as suggested travel itineraries and language phrasebooks. The English edition of Wikivoyage currently has over 27,000 articles. English is one of 15 languages that Wikivoyage is published in.

One of the advantages of the fork to Wikimedia hosting is that the site runs on the latest version of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, including MediaWiki's proven and polished mobile template.

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If your need to book a flight, hotel or car using your phone the latest version of Online travel giant Travelocity's mobile site is probably not your best bet.

The mobile homepage is nicely formatted and looks good in Android and Symbian browsers, but clicking any of the booking options leads to Travelocity's desktop site which really doesn't work very well on any mobile device. I suspect that calling Travelocity using the provided click to call number would be the best way to book while out and about.

There are some potentially useful mobile friendly features on the site, a flight status checker an another one for checking airport security wait times. Too bad they don't work. I don't trust the flight status after it showed a flight leaving Dublin 7 hours late and arriving in Newark only 50 minutes late. Pretty sure that's impossible.

Then there's the security wait time checker. Sounds handy except that it returned "There is no Security wait time data available for your query" for every airport I checked including JFK, SFO and LAX!

While I like Travelocity's desktop site, it will be a long time before try using the mobile one again.

Expedia's mobile site has air, hotel and auto search and booking and a guide to attractions at major travel destinations.  There's also a click to call number to connect directly to a reservationist

The venerable (founded in 2000) crowd sourced travel review and recommendation site TripAdvisor, now has a mobile edition with hotel, restaurant and attraction reviews by the TravelAdvisor community.

The site is compatible with most mobile browsers and is location aware on the iPhone and Android. Listings include reviews, a numeric ranking compared with similar, nearby establishments, driving directions and click to call numbers. Hotel listings include links to reserve a room using Hotels.com, Expedia or Orbitz. Source: IntoMobile

Orbitz mobile site lets you search for and book flights, hotels and car rentals, check the status of any flight.  Handy information pages for major US airports list cab fares and public transit options and current weather and average fligfht delays.

I've been playing with Tripit.com lately, it's a startup with a really clever but simple approach to travel planning. You don't even have to register, just forward the confirmation e-mails that you get from airlines, car rental agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity, Amtrak, Eurostar and hundreds of other travel companies and websites to [email protected]. Tripit parses the e-mails, including attached PDFs, and builds an itinerary for you, complete with historical temperatures, maps, and links to information about your destinations from Wikipedia and other sites.

Tripit's mobile version is pretty limited. It gives you read-only access to your itineraries, displays "Closeness Alerts" and lets you share trips by email. That's better than nothing, but I'd really like to see Tripit flesh out the mobile features. Travel is by definition a mobile activity, when I travel my phone is my PC. Travel plans change, even in the middle of a trip, but none of the Tripit features that are usable with a phone (feeds, iCalendar integration, "Tripit To Me", mobile web site) let you plan or edit trips. I tried using the full Tripit.com site in Nokia's WebKit, Opera Mobile 8.65 and Opera Mini 4.1 and I was able to view the site and enter some trip details, critical tasks including adding flights were impossible.

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Lonely Planet's mobile web site has become my new favorite free online mobile travel guide. The site provides extensive information for hundreds of cities around the world. For each destination listings cover restaurants, hotels, shopping, attractions and night life.

For major cites like Vancouver there are hundreds of listings, each of which includes a brief description, click to call phone number, address, Google map and approximate price range. The site is searchable by keyword and tag and also features Lonely Planet's Top Pick's section where guidebook authors share their favorite destinations, attractions, restaurants and hotels.

Another feature I really like is "What's Around Me" (image) which lists the best nearby restaurants and attractions for any address, city or zip/postal-code.  You do have to enter the location at least once.  Lonely Planet does remember where you are between visits to the site.I was hoping the site would use Gears to retrieve my location on my HTC Ion Android phone but it doesn't.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) mobile site is a useful one to bookmark for US residents and visitors alike whether they are driving or not.  Most services do not require an AAA membership to use. 

The best part of AAA Mobile is the "TourBook" which provides online mobile access to the hotel, restaurant, event and attractions listings in the AAA's print guidebooks.  The AAA guides are quite comprehensive, easily rivaling commercial guides like Fodors.  Listings include descriptions, address, click to call phone numbers and the AAA's "Diamonds" quality rankings. 

The site also has driving directions, click to call access to the AAA's members-only roadside assistance program and listings of discounts on goods and services available to AAA members.

I was a little disapointed by the driving directions modeule.  The directions themselves are fine and offer a choice of one to a page, turn by turn directions or with all steps together on a single page.  What bothered me was the clumsy user interface for entering start and end points.  It's overly complicated and fussy with multiple fields on separate pages for street address and city,state or zip code.  In my experience, a design with single free form fields as used by Google Local, Mapquest and Live Search is much more efficient and intuitive

London based travel reservation site. Book flights, hotels and vacation packages and find London restaurants.

7-Sept-2008 Site is up but only displays, "We're currently renovating our mobile offering so that it is up to the standard that you would expect from lastminute.com"

A  useful site for auto travelers, Gas Food Lodging provides a quick loading US only search for the nearest gas station, restaurants and hotels. Results include address, map, driving directions and click to call phone numbers.

Online mobile guides to major US cities plus London and Paris from the publisher of the Insider's Guide series of travel books. 

Guides list recommended Shops, Attractions, Tours, Transportation, Museums, Galleries, Neighborhoods, Spas, Salons, Theaters and Night Spots with descriptions, price range, address and click to call phone numbers. Page sizes can be rather large, up to 60 KB, which may be a problem for some mobile browsers. 

There's also an iPhone version of the site at wheretraveler.com/mobile which offers some additional feature including a currency converter, tip calculator, language translator, airport delay lookup and lists of airline and car rental phone numbers. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

A person to person service for finding vacation apartments and homes around the world. Property owners post listings of available rentals. Travelers can view listings by date, location and price and contact hosts and make deposits by credit card or PayPal. The site also has user reviews of listed rentals.

 

I'm a little disappointed by Airnb's mobile site which is limited to messaging between hosts and travelers. Registration, placing a listing, searching for a rentals and making reservations all require using the desktop site.

MBendi.com, a big online portal and directory provider in South Africa, recently launched this mobile directory service for travelers.

Available in 32 languages, MBendi lets you quickly find accommodations, event venues, restaurants, bars, attractions, service stations, places, organizations and people anywhere in the world. Listings include maps and click to call numbers. Source: Mobility.mobi

DOPPLER Mobile (m.dopplr.com) The social network for frequent travelers now has a mobile site. Doppler lets you share your itineraries with friends and shows you when you and your friends are in or near the same city.

A new service that's similar to Tripit (review). Store your travel itineraries on Streamthru's desktop Web site. The day before your scheduled departure Streamthru sends you a text message with a link to your personal mobile Web page containing all details of your trip and real-time flight status updates, weather, and destination guides.  There's also an option to have all information delivered by text.  Basic packages are free, an extra cost option provides additional destination information, text translation and  emergency assistamce. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

USA Travel Magazine has reviews, news, and travel tips on destinations, attractions, and events to explore on your trip across America and beyond.  All text in articles is center justified which making it hard to read. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

This site has nothing but travel videos, dozens of them covering all parts of the world. The videos are downloadable 176x144 .3gp files.

Mobile edition of travelforkids.com, a guide to child friendly attractions and things to do in major cities and vacation spots around the world. Source: Mobility.mobi

Camp Jellystone is a chain of over 70 family oriented campgrounds and RV sites throughout the US and Canada. The mobile site is a searchable directory of campground locations with addresses, season opening and closing dates and click to call numbers for each location. Source Mobility.mobi

Limo.Mobi is a directory of US limousine rental services organized by state and city. Listings include click to to call numbers. Source: Mobility.mobi

Site for Zipcar UK members to rent cars and vans by the hour or day. The mobile site lets you reserve vehicles, view, amend and delete bookings.

Book a car and van rental, view and modify your existing Eurocar car rental bookings or find the nearest car rental station in any of the 30 European, African and Middle Eastern countries served by Europcar.

This site run by the Candian Government which tells you the average wait at each USA - Canada border crossing.

An English language i-Mode portal with dozens of links to English i-mode sites in Japan. Useful to English speaking visitors to Japan, Shinkansen has links to train and bus schedules, restaurant guides, entertainment calendar, a Starbucks locator language tools and more. i-Mode, because it is mostly a subset of HTML will display reasonably well in IE, Firefox and Opera as well as most WAP2 browsers. You won't see the emoji (small icons that are resident in i-Mode browsers), instead you will get a question mark, little box or nothing at all where the emoji should appear. The latter is a problem as most links in i-Mode are on just the emoji not the text following it. The only browser that I've seen that strips emoji completely - thus removing the links is the Access Netfront browser used on some Sprint Sanyo handsets. Fortunately, most English i-Mode sites make very limited use of emoji.

Australian travel industry news including major airline, cruise and hotel launches and travel company announcements.Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

"Please Let it Be Available" worldwide budget travel search. Search for and book a variety of services including hostel and hotel rooms, car rental, taxis, restaurants and adventure travel.