Travelomy: Twitter-Based Travel Guide

Despite being one of the most popular regions for backpackers and solo travelers across the world, South Asia has lacked a dedicated travel guide that provides comprehensive, useful information to travelers. Or at least it did, until now…

Travelomy bills itself as a next-generation travel guide dedicated to exploring South Asian, packing numerous features based on rich content, social media and geo-location into a user-friendly format that offers useful, practical information to travelers.

Ciafo, the brains behind Travelomy, are not new to unique startups. They first came out with Frrole, a Twitter-based social newspaper that filters out content relevant to different cities around the world. Frrole has been a huge success, providing tons of information for specific cities that cannot be found anywhere else on the web.

So how about Travelomy? What does it do, and is it any different from the gazillions of other travel social networks and guides out there?

Well, apart from being specific to South Asia, Travelomy does have one or two interesting aspects to it. Travelomy is a social travel guide focused on bringing real-time, social information to its travel content. Ciafo claim that Travelomy’s search results are far more relevant to users than competition such as Gogobot, although it’s probably too early to tell if that really is the case.

Travelomy is similar to Wikipedia in that its content can be edited and updated by anyone who has something interesting to add to a destination or attraction.

However, the real stand out feature of Travelomy is its Twitter integration, powered by Frrole, and known as “real-time curated travel feeds”, which feed constant travel and event-related updates pertaining to each destination as they happen. To see how this feature works in reality, pay a visit to the Kathmandu page and take a quick peek.

So far, the travel feeds have only been rolled out in the top ten most popular destinations, such as Mumbai, New Delhi, the Maldvies and Colombo, but eventually Ciafo plan to extend it to cover hundreds of other, smaller destinations and attractions.

But they won’t stop there. If and when Travelomy takes off, the ultimate plan is for the site to become a global travel guide, covering the most popular cities and attractions across the world.

Of course, we’ll be waiting to see if anyone else catches on and attempts to copy the idea with their own Twitter integration…