TIME’s Magazine top travel site of 2010, Stay.com has recently added an important upgrade to its DIY travel guides planner: a personalized tips engine, that allows registered Stay.com users to ask friends, family and peers for recommendations for their travel guides via Facebook, Twitter and email.
The upgrade makes Stay.com even more useful to the users, by providing recommendations and tips from people in the know. Unlike other sites that use Facebook as a personalized tips engine, Stay.com becomes the engine itself, as it implies direct feedback on the users’ own Stay.com custom travel guides. Another positive feature is that no one can offer suggestions without being asked first. This avoids privacy issues and spamming.
Stay.com users can ask for suggestions from friends, family and the public, to improve their destination guides with the best attractions, hotels and restaurants.
The most refined new feature of Stay.com is the ability to ask for suggestions via Facebook. Users can send a message directly to one or more friends, and receive targeted, highly personalized tips.
The request appears as a direct message in the friend's Facebook account, and it's not published on the friend's wall. This ensures that the request is only seen by the user's selected friends.
The guide can be shared via Twitter and email as well, but only users with a Stay.com account will be able to offer suggestions.
To suggest a place, friends get a full screen map view, to choose an attraction from Stay.com’s own data base, or to select one from Google Places. Even custom addresses can be suggested (like home addresses) by simply dragging and dropping a market onto the map:
Suggesting custom addresses for a user's custom guide at Stay.com is a breeze.
As Stay.com’s proprietary search engine gathers data from both Stay.com own database, as well as Google Places – users can find any business registered in the city. The owner of the guide can accept the best suggestions, and discard those less interesting:
Once the guide is complete, it can be shared publicly via Facebook, Twitter or email:
The guide can be downloaded on a smartphone via Stay.com’s apps for Android and iPhone as well. iPhone and Android users can download the specific Stay.com apps free of charge, to enjoy custom travel guides and maps from their phones any time, even offline, and without paying a dime for roaming. The apps have a handy map that helps users position themselves in the city, and find their favorite attractions more easily, and at no additional cost.
For those who like printed options best, the guide can be easily printed as a compact, personalized guide at home. An environmental-friendly option, that also avoids spending money on bulky travel guides. There’s a clear map accompanying the guide, that helps users find the attractions faster.
Note: Stay.com is a Pamil Visions PR customer.