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General

What browsers do we support?

We are actively trying to support Firefox 0.8+, Mozilla 1.4+, IE 5.5+, Safari 1.2+, and Netscape 7.1+. Relatively new, but lesser used, browsers will also most likely work but we aren't testing them so we can't guarantee anything. Ancient Browsers on the other hand will probably not work, as much of the dynamic content that we are building simply uses features not found in old versions.

You also need javascript enabled and you cannot have your security settings in IE set on high - don't worry though most computers do not have a configuration like this.

Why do I need to login?

You don't but your missing out on some of the best features of the site. See below for further info.

Why do I need to give you my location when I create a login?

With your location we can do some pretty groovy integration. For example, when viewing a travel guide we show you how much it will most likely cost to fly from where you live to the location you are reading about.

I hate spam and I'm not sure I want to give you my email address when I create a login.

We understand, because we hate spam too! So first off, WE PROMISE WE WILL NEVER GIVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS AWAY.
Now that that's out of the way, let us explain why having your email address is a good thing:

First, if you add content to a travel guide and there is some question about it (such as a licensing concern) this provides a way to contact you. If we don't have a way to contact you and there is a dispute, we will most likely have to remove your work.

Also because we are not a non-profit organization like some other open content sites, we are looking into ways to balance the karma, so to speak, by giving back to the community. We haven't released our plans yet in this regard but when we do, trust us, if your contributing your going to want us to be able to get a hold of you.

Finally, unlike other websites, we figure after all this explaining, if you still don't want to give us your email, no worries, just do your edits anonymously.

Deal of the Day

Where do the deals come from?

All over the Web.
You see travel deals are popping up like no tomorrow, and we thought it would be cool to show the absolute best travel deal found. Of course the crazy travel industry usually only offers those deals for a short amount of time, so we figured, we'd sort throught 'em all and show you the best of the day. Each day we pick a new one, basically spotlighting a new place and a new deal.

Does Travature sell the deals?

Nope.
We just find them and show you where to get them. We provide a simple link (well actually its that big button that says "deal me in") and that takes you to wherever the deal is that we found. Travature doesn't buy the deals, Travture doesn't sell the deals, all we do is try to help you, the traveler see new travel deals.

Does Travature automate deals?

Nope, no bots here. We litterally have some poor sap on our team sort through deals every day to pick out the best of the best. He also has the dubious job of writing something funny. Of course most days they are only funny to him, some days they are funny to the rest of us, and once in blue moon, they might actually be funny to someone who doesn't work at the Travature office.

The deal sucks today...

Oh ya? Well mister (or miss) smarty pants, feel free to find a better one for us, and we'll change it. Send it over to deals@travature.com and if your deal finding skills are better than ours, we'll feature the one you found.

Travel Guides

What's up with the Travature travel guides?

We believe that the best travel guides are written not by one or two people but by a bunch of people who have been there. That's why our travel guides are open and editable in wiki format (think Wikipedia). In fact as many wiki gurus know, Wikipedia is often times much more accurate about its information than traditional encyclopedias (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/0114228). We believe in the long run, travel guides can benefit from the wiki concept as much if not more than encyclopedias have!

Who owns the travel guides?

Good question - you do!

One thing though that we've seen is that other open content travel sites have blurred the line over who owns what and we'd like to avoid that because we believe it breeds confusion. So we'd like to further clarify:

• All editable content of the travel guides are governed by the creative commons share-alike license and are owned by you, the community of contributors, not us (though we do contribute ourselves from time to time).
• The layout and style of the travel guides are generally controlled by us. This isn't because we want to be little dictators, its just so we can keep consistency throughout the rest of the site (don't forget that we have other cool stuff on Travature besides travel guides).
• Other non-editable elements to the travel guides are not something that originated from the community and therefore are not open. This is really more of a practical point, than anything else. There are many cool things that we are integrating into the travel guide page (the maps for example) but they are sourced or "mashed-up" from other places and are not part of the open licensing of the travel guide articles.
• The servers and the technology that we've built to run the travel guides is owned by us; this is sort of obvious but we figured we'd mention it anyway. If at some point our code looks like something more than a bowl of spaghetti we'll probably release it under an open source license.

If the community owns the travel guides can I get a copy?

Of course you can!
We've seen first hand other supposedly open content sites refuse to give a copy of "their" content because it wasn't "in their best interests". We think that's silly. We don't own the travel guide content, you do, therefore we don't have the right to police who gets it. It's your content go ahead and take it. Of course we should note that if you are going to republish it you need to continue to follow the creative commons share alike license, otherwise your going to get yourself into some legal troubles.

Now that being said, how do you get it? Just head on over to http://www.travature.com/dumps/ and grab the file called guides.xml. This file is updated to the latest copy of our guides every Sunday Night (PST).

One thing to note, is that while your welcome to reuse the travel guides however you'd like: academically, commerically, for fun, or whatever, you need to remember that the data is licensed under creative commons share-alike attribution so you HAVE to give credit to the authors if you plan to reuse the content. This is not a "Travature rule", this requirement from the license - it essentially ensures that those kind members of the community who have put blood, sweat and tears providing content for the travel community get credit where credit is due. In general, the xml format is pretty self explanatory. However for authors, there are two elements to look at "authors"(all Travature users who've edited the guide) and "origin" (all authors who had a hand in the guide before Travature). Be sure to include both, in whatever project you have brewing up.

Why do some of the Travature travel guides appear to be forked from other open travel guide sites?

Some of the guides here began life at other open travel sites, but don worry there were no sinister motives here of splitting up an existing community. We wish other travel communities the best of luck and think they are doing great. The truth is, our desire is to go in a different direction than other travel guides. First, as you'll notice we have begun to integrate travel guides, flight searches and restaurants; this integration is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of our vision and a simple data feed from another travel guide site wouldn't work for where we are headed. Second, our preference is for an active voice when authoring a guide. Many of the other online travel guides have a neutral voice. While that's great for an encyclopedia, we think travel guides should be engaging and exciting. For now we've chosen to utilize content (that share our license) from other sites so we are not starting from scratch, but our ultimate desire is for much of the content to get synthesized into something different. Finally, you will notice in our style guide that our actual format differs a bit from other travel guides, we are not being different here for the sake of being different, instead we have prepped our format for services we will be adding in the future.

Why did you chose the Creative Commons License Share-Alike License (CC-by-SA) instead of the the GNU Free Document License (GFDL)

This was a hard choice for us but ultimately we felt the CC-by-SA license was a simpler license that afforded a few more freedoms (for example printing hard copies of a travel guide under the GFDL requires you to to include the lengthy license as well). There's always tradeoffs and in this case it means some great sites we are compatible with and some great sites we aren't.

Can I copy travel guide content from Travature and put it on other online travel guides?

Yep, as long as they are also licensed under the cc-by-sa and you give author attribution then it should be fine. In fact, we think this is the whole heart of open content: to share and remix the information. Ultimately we are trying to help the greater travel community, not just Travature users and we think the more info we can share the better.

Can I still copy travel guide content from Travature to somewhere else if the location is not cc-by-sa licensed compatible (such as wikipedia)?

Unfortunately the answer is no. We wish this was not the case but because of a bunch of legal jargon a free license like the cc-by-sa does not mix with a similar free license like the gfdl (which wikipedia uses). In many cases this is silly because the general "copy-left" spirit is the same, but until those lawyer types figure out a way to harmonize things (and a very very initial step began in the cc-by-sa version 3 that was released), there's not much we can do.

A related side-note though, is that if you are the original author of a section, you can in fact put YOUR writing in both places. Because you are the author, you own your writing and essentially have the ability to dual licensing it. However this only applies to the sections you specifically wrote and usually does not apply to an entire article because the article as a whole usually has multiple authors. In general if your considering dual licensing your work so it can go in two different copy-left sites make sure you understand the idiosyncrasies of it. We are not copyright lawyers so figuring out how it works is up to you.

How do I remove a travel guide?

In general, removing a travel guide should not be taken lightly as you may be removing someone else's work. As a result for now the only way you can have a guide removed is by emailing us (help@travature.com). We understand that this may not be ideal and we are considering other options that balance control versus abuse.

Do I need to be logged in to edit a travel guide?

No, but we need to be able to keep track of who contributed what so we can give proper attribution. So if you are not logged in, we will use your ip instead of a user name for authorship and this may not be something you want shown. There are also many other benefits to logging in that you should consider.

You look somewhat similar to Wikipedia, are you running their Media Wiki software?

No, we were originally using their wiki engine for initial development but found that for the expansion and direction we were going it was easier to write our own. In general though because they are the model for open content, we have to a degree tried to follow their philosophy and architecture. We think the Wikimedia Foundation guys that paved the way for open content are amazing and we have nothing but respect for them.

Do you support wiki markup?

No, we've thought long and hard about if we should and ultimately we've decided that a simple wysiwyg is the easiest way for most people to edit travel information.

What's this "I'm feeling Adventurous" all about?

We think traveling to a new place is one of the most exciting aspects to traveling in general. To help encourage your discovery of new places to dream about we've added this link to take you to an entirely random travel guide. It's sort of like putting your finger on spinning globe and seeing where it lands.

Flight Search

Are flights booked on Travature?

No, we search the Internet for the best possible flights so you don't have to go through each airline and travel agency site individually. We know you are busy so this is a great way to save time! The technical term for this is "meta-searching". Maybe an easier way to think of it as a sort of Google for flight searches where we find the best results and give you the link so you can go to the resulting website that looks the best to you.

How is your flight metasearch engine different than other flight search engines?

There is a key weakness with many of the metasearch engines' travel results. Each time a user clicks on a result, the metasearch company gets paid from the corresponding travel provider. Now we don't mean just getting paid for the sponsored results you are used to seeing; they get paid for the actual result. This is akin to the original search engines during the beginning of the Internet that would get paid off to place certain websites higher on their results list. Modern search engines, however, have ultimately shown that 100% unbiased search results are important to the user because it helps guarantee that you are showing the best possible match for a query.

We believe that modeling our service after trusted search engines is the right thing to do. As a result we have refused to accept money related to flight results. Just like a traditional search we believe a metasearch result should be ranked based on its relevance to you, and not based be based on how much money we could be getting from a travel company. Thus, we commit to clearly separating sponsored results and actual results to ensures that there's no confusion or conflict of interest. We make this distinction because providing the best information for travelers is our number one priority - we are travelers too and we are not about to taint our results just to add more money to our bottom line. We hope that you as a user notice this difference.

Why are nearly all the flight search fields marked as optional?

One of the major motivators that kick-started Travature was our frustration with the inflexibility and presentation of traditional online flight sites. In the traditional model if your not sure where you want to fly to or haven't figured out the exact dates to fly on, you have to sort of improvise and put bogus information in to see your options. Essentially there isn't a good way to research flight possibilities; you basically have to know your precise flight information before you can even use a traditional booking engine.

But we've come up with a unique and novel way to do flight research before you do your flight booking. We help you see where you might want to go and what dates you might want to go there, before you even start looking into flight specifics. And of course once you get all your info straight you can kick off our flight metasearch engine to grab the best prices and find the best site to make a booking. We consider this all a fluid process; here's how it works:

• If you only put the city your leaving from in our flight search - we assume you haven't figured out exactly where you are going yet. To help you decide we'll give you a list of different places you can fly (from the origin location you gave) with descriptions and basic pricing. Read about the places your interested in our travel guides and look at the estimated fares to each place to get an idea of where you want to go.
• If you input leaving and arriving cities in our flight search but leave the dates blank we assume you now know where you want to go but haven't decided on which dates to leave. We again try to help you by displaying basic pricing for each day you could leave on. The pricing is per way, but it gives you an idea of what the cost break down is for leaving on one day versus another, or even one month versus a different month.
• If you input leaving and arriving cities plus a leaving date in our flight search we assume that you left the returning date blank because your interested in a one way flight. We then kick off our real-time metasearch engine to go find the best flights offered on the web.
• If you have everything on the flight search form filled out well than we just do a normal real time flight metasearch to find the best roundtrip flights offered throughout the web.

We think its all a pretty simple process and we hope it makes your flight planning easier!

Restaurant Reviews

How do I add a review to a restaurant?

If you are looking at restaurant results, all you have to do is hover over the restaurant rating and you will see the stars change colors. Pick your rating, and click on it, and you'll be magically taken to the restaurant review page where you can add your comments/experiences.

Also if you are looking at the restaurant details page, there is a link at the top of the reviews that says the amazingly cryptic statement: "add review".

How do I add a restaurant ?

Search for the restaurant name and if it doesn't already exist there will be a big shiny blue button instead of results, that says, you guessed it: "add restaurant".

Some people have asked us to have a more prominent way to add restaurants. While we are considering a way to do that, right now we are trying to avoid creating duplicate copies of restaurants by having you check to see if the restaurant exists first.

I want to add a restaurant, but don't know all the details ?

Thats okay. Just put in what you know and someother kind soul will probably come around and add aditional info that you left out. The only thing you need to know is the name (you do know that right?) and where its located.

What do I do if I want to add a restaurant in a city that is not yet available?

First make sure that your not trying to add a restaurant in the neighborhood of a larger city. An example is a restaurant located in a small suburb town like La Jolla, that is very close to a major city such as San Diego. In this case when you are asked what city the restaurant is located near, you'd put San Diego, but when you fil out the specific address you will put La Jolla for the city address. Now, if you think think this sounds complicated, we agree, but we do have a method to the madness. You see, because we are focused on traveling, its important that we make things easy for people who are visiting. Consider someone visiting a major city such as San Diego or New York City - a tourist is not going to know all the suburbs, yet the suburbs may contain some of the best food in the greater area. By associating the restaurant with the major city that is close, whenever you look at a travel guide or a mashup or flight to that major city, you can see the restaurant. And of course, the converse is that you as a local can still see the restaurant by searching on the suburb neighbor (such as La Jolla). Its the best of both worlds!

Ok, Ok, so what if you are trying to add a restaurant to an actual major city not yet on the list? (this should really only occur for international cities) You have two options: If you are the go-getter type, then create a travel guide for the city. You see, travel guides are where the restaurant list comes from, so once the guide is there, you can add restaurants to that city. Now on the otherhand, if that sounds like too much, just shoot us an email and we'll take care of it.

Travel Mashups

What is this "Mash-Up" you speak of?

A key change in Web 2.0 world (who buzzword alert) is the notion that that the amount of information available on the Internet is so staggering that users needed a way to 'put it all together'. The mashup is the response, a way to connect and aggregate information into a more useful form. Mashups are popping up everywhere: want to visualize where craigslist ads are on a map - look at a mashup, want to see music videos and accompanying lyrics - look at a mashup, and the list goes on and on. Of course what was missing from the list was Travel. Want to see travel guides connected to airfare connected to a photo stream of the place? Yeah that didn't exist.

So Travature set out with vision of creating all of the most important tools for trip planning, then putting it all together on one happy page.
To start off we "mashup"; flight-searches, travel guides, restaurant reviews, maps, and photo streams, but keep checking back because we plan to add all kinds of travel tools to the mash up page in the future.
Oh and by the way, if you have an idea about a new travel tool to stick on the mashup page, please do tell: ideas@travature.com