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Monday, June 15th, 2009

Keep blogging about your city

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

We’ve been running our Local Expert program for almost two years. Thousands of articles about world-class cities are available to help you understand each destination before engaging in a new journey.

More recently we started to invite independent bloggers to post their articles within our city guides. Bloggers in Lima, Marrakech, Mexico City, Rome, Santiago and Singapore have already enlisted. If you write a blog about a city for which we don’t have a featured Local Expert, we want to know about it!

And for all of you moleskine die-hards or modern story-makers, we would love to get pointers to any bloggers who are sketching their cities. Encouraged by the sketches of artist Gabriel Campanario, we are hoping there are more people out there that make it a habit to bring their drawings to the online world after a prolific session with their notebooks. Hopefully you’ll remember to note the address of whatever you’re drawing, as we are all about location.

As we discover them, we’ll make an effort to link to them from our city guides and give travellers a new way to explore destinations.

We’ve also made it easy for any PlanetEye user to submit reviews attached to a location by virtue of blogging about it:

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile – each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is include a link to http://www.planeteye.com/Place/The-Peninsula-Chicago+357902.aspx

This should be pretty useful if you have a blog but don’t write about your city all the time. Just make sure to include the proper PlanetEye link whenever you do have a post about a location and we’ll link to it.

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

The World’s Most Expensive Hotels

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

Ever wonder what kind of hotel would cost US$1,000 per night? The price seems so steep that one could easily assume there are only a handful of these hotels around the world, but in a recent survey of our more than 100k hotels, we found almost one hundred of them, nicely distributed across all continents.

(use the zoom controls or click on any of the markers to get more details)

This exclusive group of hotels includes some of the most famous hotel properties, such as:

Would you like to embed a map like this one into you blog? Read all about our Embedded Travel Packs.

Monday, December 1st, 2008

PlanetEye 101

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Over the past year, one of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked about PlanetEye is “So, what is PlanetEye”. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve answered, I’d be a rich man…or something like that!

To make it easier to tell people what PlanetEye does, we put together a short video that provides an overview on why PlanetEye is such an interesting and valuable travel planning destination. Note: The voice was done by yours truly, which gives me new-found appreciation for people who do it professionally!

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Fine Dining at Airport Restaurants

Mark Evans
Director, Community

As millions of people travel this week during the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, there is going to be a lot of time spent waiting at airports for flights.

Chances are you will probably get hungry but it can be a major challenge trying to figure out where to eat. Do you simply head to the closest food court or take a short walk to a little gem tucked away from the crowds?

To make your dining choices a lot of easier, PlanetEye asked its local experts to recommend the best places to eat at more than 40 airports around the world. These are clearly people who know their airports and the dining choices given the wealth of information they provided.

For more information about the best places to eat at more than 40 restaurants around the world, check out our Airport Restaurants page.

More: If you’re interested in checking out an airplane restaurant as opposed to an airport restaurant, Cranky Flier found one in Walnut Ridge, Ark. where the Parachute Inn has taken a Southwest 737-200 fuselage and converted into a restaurant.

As well, USA Today’s Today in the Sky column reports that about “80% of restaurants at the nation’s 15 busiest airports now offer at least one low-fat, high-fiber, cholesterol-free vegetarian option, according to an annual survey by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Parachute Inn

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Friday, November 14th, 2008

PlanetEye at the PhocusWright Conference

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Next week, PlanetEye CEO Butch Langlois and VP of Business Development, Jonah Sigel, will be attending the PhocusWright Travel Innovation Conference in Hollywood.

We’re particularly excited because Butch will be giving a presentation on the main stage on Monday afternoon, which will feature a really cool intro that will give people a quick and entertaining snapshot of what we do.

As well, Butch will be among the CEOs participating in the Bloggers Innovation Briefing on Tuesday morning (Nov. 18) – a forum where bloggers and the media can do informal Q&A sessions.

If you’re at the conference and would like to touch base with Butch or Jonah, let me know by sending an e-mail to markATplaneteye.com

More: Stephen Joyce is doing a series of profiles on the companies presenting next week at the conference. Here’s his review on PlanetEye.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

PlanetEye Unveils Partnership with Venere.com

Mark Evans
Director, Community

As PlanetEye looks to expand its presence around the world and establish new partnerships, we’re really  excited about a new strategic partnership with Venere.com, a move that significantly enhances PlanetEye’s ability to offer travellers a variety of places to stay in Europe.

Venere.com is among a growing group of partners that PlanetEye has attracted this year as it focuses on providing a wide range of valuable services – whether you want to book a hotel, restaurant, flight or spa appointment.

Our partners now include Venere.com, Travelocity, StubHub, OpenTable, Road Food, Where the Locals Eat, WaySpa and BookingBuddy.

“PlanetEye wants to serve the accommodation needs of travellers anywhere around the world, and our partnership with Venere.com is an important part of this strategy,” said Butch Langlois, PlanetEye’s CEO and president.

“We selected Venere.com because it has an extensive online portfolio, ranging from hotels and B&Bs to farmhouses and vacation rentals. We’re particularly excited about Venere.com’s strong presence in Europe.”

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

PlanetEye to Star in Hollywood

Mark Evans
Director, Community

PlanetEye has been selected to be one of 20 companies to present at the PhocusWright  Travel Innovation Summit in Hollywood on November 17.

Our CEO, Butch Langlois, will give a 10-minute presentation about what we’re doing and why PlanetEye is striving to become the leading online travel planning destination.

If you’d like to meet Butch and Jonah Sigel, our VP, Business Development, at the conference, drop me an e-mail at mark {at} planeteye (.) com

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008


Moments in the Life of a Cultural Navigator

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Kazakh Gallery Ontheglobe (16)-4

One of the more interesting trends within the travel landscape in recent years has been the growing interest in destinations off the beaten path such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Kazakhstan.


Andrew Princz, a well-known travel writers who’s also PlanetEye’s local expert for Budapest, recently visited Kazakhstan. He was good enough to provide his thoughts on the country, as well as provide some photographs by Anna J. Kutor.


When your job title is Cultural Navigator – which includes being thrown into a slew of cultural experiences in far-flung lands, and then adapting to them as fast as lightening – life has some glorious moments.


Take the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, one of the world’s lesser known areas but a stupendously beautiful place. It had me skipping at least one heartbeat.

It was here that I recently lived one of these euphoric moments at Charyn Canyon, some 200 km east of Almaty, not far from the Chinese border. It was a brief visit to the top of the world, as my colleague Anna described it.

A group of about 20 of us boarded an impressive looking bird of a helicopter whose throbbing clatter mounted intensely until after a gentle nudge, and we slowly became airborne, floating over the sometimes unforgiving and vast Kazakh landscapes.

We took turns peaking out of the small rounded window that stayed open as we soared over snow-capped mountains, lush green forests, arid flatlands, the Azur-blue Kolsay Lake and our destination – smack on top of Charyn Canyon overlooking the place that is sometimes called the ‘Valley of the Castles’.

Our hosts gave us a boxed lunch, as we happily ate overlooking the impressive gorges. Moments like these make adventuring worthwhile: I was at home here, if only for a moment. But what a moment.

Kazakhstan – isolated from tourism for decades during its Soviet years – is now coming out of the woodwork. While it may have been put on the map by the famous or infamous film Borat, Kazakhstan has nothing to do with the strange character’s misspoken words.

This country’s capital Astana is a jewel of modernity, being propped up by the country’s vast oil-wealth. In multi-coloured Astana, sky-piercing high-rise buildings are mushrooming everywhere and cranes permeate the landscape.

We also ventured south to the cities of the ancient Silk Road. Little of the vestiges of this trading route remains – the fault of both ancient invading armies, and more recently culturally derelict Soviet minds.
But you will find mosques and mausoleums. Most notably in the otherwise nondescript settlement of Turkistan at the 14th century Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a pilgrimage site.

Some say that this is the second most holy place in Islam after Mecca, and three pilgrimages here are equivalent to one pilgrimage to Mecca.

Here I woke up at sunrise for another cathartic moment as hundreds of wailing birds circled the holy site – paying their daily visit. Perhaps, a pilgrimage of their own. We were at home. We had made our pilgrimage.

Montreal-based travel journalist, broadcaster and cultural navigator Andrew Princz is the editor of the travel portal ontheglobe.com. Andrew is involved in country awareness and tourism promotion projects globally. He will speak on various destinations in his forthcoming series Travels OnTheGlobe.

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Monday, October 6th, 2008

PlanetEye’s Growing RSS Menu

Mark Evans
Director, Community

RSS (aka Really Simple Syndication) is a great and easy to deliver and consume online content. Slowly but surely, RSS is becoming a mainstream tool as publishers embrace and promote it, and Web users start to realize how useful it can be.

We’re big fans of RSS so we’ve (actually, Juan Gonzalez, our VP, Technology) started to create RSS feeds to make it easier read our great content. Here’s the low-down on what’s available on PlanetEye’s RSS menu.

1. You can subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss any of our posts.

2. Have all of our new Local Expert posts delivered to your RSS reader.

3. Get the scoop on the most recent Travel Packs created by PlanetEye’s editors and PlanetEye members.

To learn more about RSS and how to use it, check out this great Common Craft video:

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Lessons Learnt from a Trip to Wonderland

karen
Marketing Coordinator

Yesterday, I went to Canada’s Wonderland with a bunch of friends. What was planned as a day of fun was quickly turned into a day of extreme rain. We went on only a handful of rides before we were soaked to the bone. I was instantly reminded of the summer I spent living in China (where rains can be so extreme that all public transport and major buildings are shut down.)

We decided to make the best of it and headed straight for the funnel cake stand.

We braved the weather for about another hour before we headed to a friend’s house in Kleinburg to dry our clothes and wait out the storm. 

It took only 2 hours to wait it out, and we were dry and raring to go. We returned to the park, and magically, we had some of the best weather we have had all summer. Luckier still was that the crowd had been reduced significantly. We were also able to get on every single ride we wanted at least twice, and we had an absolute ball. (I still can’t believe I braved Behemoth twice in a row.)

On my third trip around the Wilde Beast, I was able to put the whole day into perspective: this is why people travel, and this is why patience and fearlessness is required there, too.

People travel to put themselves out of their comfort zone. We were at Wonderland to scare ourselves all day. There is no “greater purpose” to subjecting yourself to the weird forms of torture that only rollercoasters can provide.

I spent a day in what began as an uncomfortable situation, and it was only when I gave in to the fact that I was on someone else’s turf and couldn’t control my surroundings did it get to be truly enjoyable.  This is exactly what I had to do when I was in China. I got off the plane, didn’t speak the language, and had to make my way to meet my new boss at a location I had never been to (all after 21 hours in the air.) It was only when I bucked up and let life “take the wheel” that the experience truly became amazing.

This is the essence of what makes travelling magical. It’s the ultimate thrill ride that always leaves you with a sense of having really done something. 

We’d like to know if you’ve ever had a time when you felt really out of your element whilst on vacation. Respond in the comments below.

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This is a blog about travel, photography, technology and their convergence online. Visit PlanetEye to learn more about our one-stop travel planning service.

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