Travel Guides

If you are a fan of Barcelona, as I am, or if you plan to visit this wonderful city, then you must read this article.

First of all, I can give 5 reasons to visit Barcelona:

1. The city architecture is a strange combination of old and modern, giving a special flair to this bimilennial city. Antonio Gaudi let many traces in his city, among them Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell, La Pedrera.

2.Shopping. Barcelona is a shopping paradise for everyone of you, no matter of higher standards you have. I bet! You can make shopping in big supermarkets, or in the narrow streets of the old city.

3.Football. Ever heard about C.F. Barcelona? About Eto’o, Cruyff, Deco and so many others big football players? About millions of socios from all over the world?

Burma is a nice land in South East Asia, bordering with China, India and the ocean. It was until 1949 a british colony.

Worse than that, it is ruled since 40 years by a military dictatorship. The neighboring India, the biggest world’s democracy, keeps the eyes shut on the human rights violation, as it it is very interested in controlling the Burma oil reserves.

The worst: a devastating cyclone, called Nagis, hit Burma and caused 100 000 human victims. Other 2 000 000 people lost their houses and live on the streets. There is a dramatic lack of drinking water and basic food, consisting the major risk of outbreaking epidemics as cholera, hepatitis and typhoydis. And the military government did not allow to the foreign aids to enter the country, which is not easy to understand.

In order to help Burma, I would have the following suggestions:

Hello Sebastian, can you tell some information about you and the Tripwolf team?

I am originally from Vienna, Austria, but I have been living in New York for 2 years. I’m 30 years old and a passionate traveler: I have visited 70 countries. For the last few years I worked as a journalist and international correspondent for Austrian and German print magazines, covering stories like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the youth scene in Teheran, the hunt for war criminal General Mladic in Serbia or the working conditions in Brazil’s sugar industry.

I am running the company together with my best friend Alexander Trieb who is based in Manhattan. He has lots of start-up experience, both from the US and Europe and he worked in IT and management consulting before we started tripwolf.

At the moment the tripwolf team consists of 10 – 12 people, based in New York, Vienna, Budapest and San Francisco.

Tripwolf is a trip planner and social travel guide. Website is still in private beta phase, so if you are one among those who have been allowed to use it, congrats! Others can enter their name and email-id in Tripwolf and hope someone from TripWolf will send you an invite, or use this one.

TripWolf has a very nice design and easy to use interface. As for me, it did not take me more than 30 seconds to understand what does this site do and how to use it. My grandmother might take 60 seconds maximum to start using this site. It has a very useful drag and drop feature where you can drag the places you want to visit and drop it into your scrapbook, from where you can create a pdf guide and download it onto your computer. The downloaded pdf has all the necessary information about the places you want to visit. Let me give you an example, I created a pdf guide for Cairo, Egypt. It had all the information I wanted to know as a traveller if I wanted to visit Cairo like places to visit, shopping, nightlife, restaurants, accommodation and many more. This is helpful for travelers who can just add the pdf to their mobile phones and read it when they are travelling even without having internet access to visit the website.

A few years ago a good friend of mine, a belgian expat living in Romania, used to visit his parents in Belgium via Athens! The reason is easy to guess: besides a visit in the greek islands, the flight offer from Athens was cheaper than from Romania! Low flights and low airfares were practically unknown from Bucharest, he only had expensive choices with prestige companies. Because of these facts, he ordered the airline tickets online and took the plane from Athens.

Meanwhile he can also fly cheap from Bucharest with no name companies, whose secrets are easy to guess and to unveil: less luxury and meals on board, cheaper planes, cheaper airports etc.

The differences are huge, more than three times! It means quite something for an addicted traveler like me, my friend and perhaps all of you. Unfortunately for the big companies, the cheap companies are also reliable and safe. But for the big companies remain the long range flights, there are no cheap alternatives for this market!

Mexico City is the second megacity of our planet, after Tokyo. 25 millions people from Area metropolitana call Mexico City home. To make a comparation: all the scandinavian coutries put together reach not 25 millions people!

Mexico City is huge and is expanding daily and florishes. It is the country’s most important economic and financial hub, easy to imagine. It is also a megacity of contrasts:

-it is an expansive city, but you can also live on budget here;

-between all the megacities of our world,it is maybe the worst located megacity of our planet( a valley surrounded by mountains at 2300 m, which makes ventilation impossible)

-it is generally a safe place, but you should avoid Tepito, where drugs addicted and drug smuggler deal all day long. Especially if you don’t speak spanish, you can count with hard times

Nice picture of South of Manhattan, New York
View from the Empire State building

Expedia: started 2008 on $0.31 a share. Now $0.25. -19%

British Airways: started 2008 on £3.09 a share. Now £2.48. -19%

EasyJet: started 2008 on £6.13 a share. Now £3.24. -47%

MoneySupermarket (owner of TravelSupermarket): started 2008 on £1.40 a share. Now £1.14. -19%

Orbitz Worldwide: started 2008 on $8.50. Now $8.78. +3%

Priceline: started 2008 on $1.15 a share. Now $1.26. +10%

Ryanair: Started 2008 on Euro 0.39 a share. Now Euro 0.30. -23%

SilverJet: started 2008 on £0.48 a share. Now £0.15. -69%

Thomas Cook: started 2008 on £2.82 a share. Now £2.66. -7%

TUI Travel: started 2008 on £2.94 a share. Now £2.41. -18%

Travelzest: started 2008 on £1.01 a share. Now £1.02. +1%

Travelzoo: started 2008 on $0.14 a share. Now $0.11. -21%

From Travolution