The current economic crisis effects everybody one way or another, and travelers are especially not exempt from the money pinch. The cost of airline tickets, hotels, rental cars, and other associated costs pile high, and with savings accounts dwindling, nobody wants to spend their precious dough on costly travel books. The library is one money-saving alternative, but your local branch may carry an out of date copy of the location you are visiting, or perhaps no copy at all. Another cheap alternative is using sites like Wikipedia or Wikitravel and the likes, but who has the time to compile all that information?

Enter OffBeatGuides

OffBeatGuides.com is a newer website that is still currently in Beta status, but, assuming it transitions into “gold” status, is bound to be a great and relatively cheap travel resource (as low as $9.99 per guide, see below for more pricing details).

The main idea behind OBG is that there is a TON of free information floating around the net but the average person doesn’t want to spend the time hunting through various webpages printing page after page to bring with them. Instead, when a traveler inputs their travel information (to include locations, and dates), OBG scours various websites and arranges the findings into an easy to read, personalized travel guide.

Start Building Your Guide

This couldn’t be easier, which is just the way I like it. First, input your destination. As you type, OBG lists several destinations to choose from, and it’s likely that yours is on the list. If not, that could be an issue, but we will get to that later. Next, OBG will ask where you are traveling from. Supposedly OBG will customize the guide more to “you likings” based off of where you are from, but I’m not sure I buy that… yet. Enter the dates you are traveling, and OBG will create a list of events based around your travel dates. The last step is optional, entering the name or location of where you are staying (e.g. your hotel) so that OBG can pull customized Google Maps for your exact area.

That Wasn’t Too Hard, Was It?

After you are done inputing your information, OBG will take a moment to assemble your new guide and organize a preview. Within the preview you can view exactly what will be in your guide, and edit out the parts that you don’t want included, however this won’t reduce the price, only the size of the printed guide.

Within the guide you are going to find all the information you would expect to find in a travel guide, such as general information about the area, climate, customs and courtesies of the culture, where to eat, where to stay, what to do, how to get around, maps of the general area and neighborhoods (handy for first time visitors to a place like NYC, San Francisco or Seattle), Google Maps, and broken down information about nearby areas.

Obviously, not every guide is going to be a huge in-depth guide telling you everything you need to know about your chosen location. The OBG FAQ’s estimate that the travel guides will be an average of 100-150 pages. If the location you have entered doesn’t produce enough results to form a good size publication, OBG will inform you that they are sorry but they won’t sell you a piece of crap, and to check back at a later time. One example I tried of a guide for San Francisco ran 290 pages! Another for Seattle ran about 110, and Hong Kong was around 165. Smaller locations such as

Once you polish up the information that you need, it’s time to plunge in and purchase. For $9.95, a PDF version of the guide will be available for you to download. For $24.95, not only can you download the PDF version, but OBG will mail you a printed booklet sized version (there is also a $24.95 option for just the printed guide, but why not take the PDF version for free?)

Pros

OBG has some really strong selling points.
- With travel guides costing $30+, $9.95 is a bargain. Many travelers bring their laptops with them nowadays, so there could be little to no need for the printed version. Perhaps only printing one or two pages at a time along the way is more your style?
- The information is instant, and accessible anytime, anywhere. Perhaps you are in Venice and on a whim decide to travel to Slovenia instead of Hungary. You could hunt desperately for a bookstore that sells english printed guides (or be super adventurous and just go for it!), or you could log on, enter a few details, and have a travel guide in minutes!
- The information is up to date. With pages like Wikipedia and Wikitravel becoming more popular, and users constantly updating the information, you get the most current details available. You could purchase a travel guide that was printed 18 months before your trip, but then how would you know that the hostel you were headed to burned down 6 months ago?

Cons

With every new program, comes a few hitches.
- Yes, the information is free, but not everybody wants to spend the time organizing the information themselves. OBG also produces more information than Wikipedia and Wikitravel alone.
- Although $9.95 is a great price, $24.95 is about what you would pay at Borders for a travel guide.
- OBG gets their information from other social sites, and as we all know, they aren’t always the most accurate.

Parting Thoughts

Overall I think that OffBeatGuides.com has some great potential. Since it’s in Beta, there may be bugs here and there but I haven’t found any yet. Right now it is GREAT for some of the bigger cities, but you may be hard pressed to find a great guide on smaller cities. OBG may not be for everyone, especially the super penny pinchers, but for someone willing to spend $30+ for a printed guide may as well save themselves $20 and help out what is bound to be a great site.