You can’t beat local knowledge

by Steve Keenan

About six years ago, when at times online.co.uk, I first came across the website SpottedbyLocals.com, run by the very fine Bart van Poll out of Amsterdam. It was a revelation – a site that gave travel tips from residents living in different cities.

Eureka! Why send a journalist to write a city round-up when I could ask people on the ground? Why go anywhere else to research when residents were adding the latest openings and news to one huge pool of information?

Bart had something like 15 cities covered then: now he has 41. The technology has moved on a bit. Still slick but the information is better presented on maps. More categories per city too. And on PDF and iPhone.

But the principle is still the same: a number of residents in each city adding the latest to the site all the time. You really can’t beat that format, although dozens of sites since still believe they can.

The number of start-up travel planner sites emerging is more down to wiring networks together than knowledge of a place: the technicians assume we’ll do all that work for them.

But why would I? If there is an established site like SbL around, or The Guardian’s excellent series of city guides, what could a random collection of ageing recollections from a bunch of random contacts or acquaintances achieve?

If a mate lived there, or had just returned, I’d ask. Otherwise I’d stick to what I know and trust. There is not a hope of 95 per cent of these newcomer sites surviving, unless they have the scale, ambition and deep pockets of a Trippy.com.

Or they have the cool originality of Unlike.net, a site I came across this week while researching an article on Warsaw (see image, above).

The content on here is excellent. Look at Amsterdam – Bart’s back yard – to see lists for food, clubs, fashion etc., written by locals and augmented with other reviews of new openings and offbeat haunts. The layout is Pinterest in style: very visual and very readable.

It’s now going down the route of adding contributor content. Now that could work – top content, great layout and added recommendations from strangers. But it would never work without that strong base of content in the first place.

It could even give Bart a run for his money. Although, with a 10-year head start, I doubt it.