Visiteurope.com – the international portal for European Travel
Friday, June 13. 2008
Some weeks ago I have reviewed the travel community Dodo.com, which mainly builds on user generated information about different travel destinations all over the world. This time I will write about a different approach of giving travel information. The European Travel Commission (which is an association of 37 national tourist offices from all over Europe) has created Visiteurope.com - an information portal, about their countries and travel destinations.
The approach to information providing is completely here. Where a travel community likely will give you somehow “user-biased” information about certain travel-destinations, which might require knowing more about the users, who wrote certain articles, Visiteurope.com guarantees, that information is only biased by the local travel agencies, which compile the information about their country But that is a perspective I can very well live with, since I know that the information is kind of official and therefore reliable!
The main feature of Visiteurope.com is a flash-based interactive travel map, which allows you to zoom onto all countries of Europe and get information about those possible travel destinations. This is a really nicely programed tool - unluckily it won't work on any mobile phones, which don't have flash support (both my S/O/N/Y P1i and my iPhone don't support flash ) The map tool allows you to browse Europe by both region and country. So if you are interested in more than one country, this might be helpful, as well. Browsing through those regions, there is a short information texton the regions. Chosing to get more information here, you get rerouted to the portal, with detailed information about the regarding region or country. The information is very detailed, and reminds me to early versions of MS Encarta. But since we are talking about a information portal here, there are plenty of links, which guide you to more information about the countries.
The main page of Visiteurope.com also provides news about interesting events all over Europe. There is a news section pointing out current information on big events. But there is still more. Categories "Where to go", "Things to do", "Accomodation", "How to travel", "Useful Info", Images and "Toolbox" are providing various information about traveling through Europe. Especially if you are not European and use to travel here anyway, the information provided through the portal can be extremely helpful.
If you want to get an overview on what interesting destinations Europe might provide in general – Visiteurope.com is the place to go. It is interesting to brows through different country information and to get information on various cities. There are also relevant links to get you to more information, which is exactly the purpose of an information portal! From my point of view I would like to see more community features, even if it is just a portal. Probably just as simple as to rate different articles or information. Just a little more interactivity.