Back in July I interviewed Your Local Cousin about their service providing local advice to travelers. I’ve recently run across some other similar trip planning, travel advice and peer to peer tour services. As always, you can find these and many other similar businesses in my spreadsheet of sharing economy travel services.
Interestingly, before I could get this post up, one of the local advice businesses closed shop: Exploring provided travel advice from “experts” (such as professional travel writers) in a curated peer-to-peer marketplace for trip planning help. Their website now has this message: “We loved connecting travelers with travel writers and other experts to plan their vacations. But, we just couldn’t make the business work in a way that we thought would be helpful to customers, beneficial to experts while sustaining a viable, long-term business.” I do like the idea of getting advice from locals through this peer-to-peer model so I hope Your Local Cousin, and others in this space, have more success.
Tripbod is a marketplace for travel advice, connecting travelers with locals. They were acquired by TripAdvisor in 2014.
Another interesting advice-related business is Agentika, a Russian based business launched in 2015 that provides a platform for travelers to offer advice and information to other travelers. The site includes a travel planner so you can create itineraries based on information you find, and a payment system that will compensate the advisors for the information they provide.
More on the lines of peer to peer tour companies, BeMyGuest offers a combination of peer to peer and small business tours in Asia.
I see a lot of new peer-to-peer tour businesses opening in Asia. This makes sense as the market isn’t saturated with formal tours, and there are a lot of travelers taking advantage of the cheap prices in the region and many locals who don’t have the access to technology to just offer their own tour services without a peer-to-peer website middle-person.
Lastly, I want to mention another addition to the peer-to-peer tour businesses in Europe. I just recently discovered Guide Like You, a French company that is connecting travelers with locals for tours and activities in Europe.
The site is still a little rough around the edges, but it has a decent number of listings, especially in France. You can find all the peer to peer tour companies in my spreadsheet, just filter on the “Activities” category.
I’m curious – how do these P2P tour sites get the local guides to sign up in the first place?
Good question David. I know some of them do a lot of in-person vetting of guides and only focus on regions that they know or places where they have solid connections. Others rely on online outreach and are far more loose about who can sign up. One of the larger sites, Vayable, requires prospective guides to make a brief video for verification, so there’s a bit of a bar to sign up, but it’s not too hard to get past that (I created a tour of my own on there and they really have no way of knowing much about it).
It’s simple to use and you can withdraw your earnings to PayPal, but for today it’s mostly for russian speaking users..
One interesting detail about agentika.com – you can not only plan your trip there, you can alse earn some money there by creating new places..
Nice, have you tried this Alex? Is the interface and payout simple enough to use? I’ll have to look more closely at this feature.