TripAdvisor
This concludes our four-part series containing 50 tips about How to Travel Cheaply. In today’s guest post, Jesse Miller looks at how you can save money on sightseeing and entertainment, how to manage your money while traveling, and adds some safety tips that can have financial ramifications as well.
Previous posts in the series offer tips on Planning Your Trip, Saving Money on Transportation, and Saving Money on Accommodations and Food.
By Jesse Miller
Sightseeing & Entertainment Tips
1. Be Picky.
Plan to visit your top two or three sites instead of taking a whirlwind tour of all the attractions your destination has to offer. By doing so, you can spend as much time as you’d like connecting with these areas while eliminating rushing around from one tourist spot to the next.
While at these locations,… Continue reading
Most of us, when we travel to another country, probably have in mind at least one “must-see” attraction., usually an iconic structure, museum, historic site, or natural wonder.
Examples might be Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, the Roman Colosseum in Italy, and the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary.
Recently, TripAdvisor — which has propelled itself into the world’s leading travel site and travel data bank — released a map of Europe displaying the “one thing you must do in each country, according to tourists.” (I found it in the Huffington Post.)
For most countries, the results were pretty true to form: The Roman Colosseum in Italy; The Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tallinn Old Town in Estonia; the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece; the… Continue reading
Which destinations do travelers really want to go to right now — as opposed to ones that they might only be dreaming about for the future?
The always informative travel news site skift.com has a piece that tries to answer that question, based on “millions of searches and reviews” on the mega-review site TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor has come out with lists of “places that have seen the greatest increase in positive traveler feedback and traveler interest” of late — in short, destinations that are “on the rise.”
The destinations are listed in “top ten” order globally as well as for the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific. The lists reflect all age groups so there’s no way of knowing what percentage were baby boomers doing the searching.
Here, according… Continue reading
I’ve long had an ambivalent feeling toward the reviews on TripAdvisor, the extremely successful user-driven website that provides readers’ takes on everything from hotels and restaurants to museums and travel activities.
Like many baby boomers, I find the reviews can be extremely helpful in sorting out the travel-related chaff from the wheat — a long as I can first sort out the chaff from the wheat of the reviews themselves.
It’s not uncommon to come across restaurant reviews, for instance, that are the diametric opposites of each other:
“Ate at Luigi’s last night, and it was the greatest meal I’ve ever had — maybe the best that anyone has ever had! Love those meatballs!”
And, right below it: “Don’t listen to anyone who likes Luigi’s — this place is the worst! Worst food, worst service, and… Continue reading