I took a premature look at PlanetEye in June. I found a conceptually interesting product that wasn't ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It's now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.
The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the "Travel Pack," which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you're going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack's items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I'm thinking of creating a "Rafe's S.F. Visitor Guide" pack to send to people who come to visit our home.
Activities, restaurants, and hotels get useful summary pages.
(Credit: PlanetEye)Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they'll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it's a very attractive site--more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.
However, the system doesn't do enough for you once you've built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there's no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I'd like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.
Travel Packs can be private, or you can borrow a public one.
(Credit: PlanetEye)
Update: After this story went live, PlanetEye spokespeople contacted me to say that the version of the site reviewed here is not the site they'll be pushing out to the public. That site, scheduled to go live on July 10, will have the new, smarter Travel Pack feature that was pitched to me in a meeting. As I say at the end of the review, I recommend you hold off on trying the site until that new version is online.
With the cost of travel and fuel continuing to rise, I don't understand why anyone would launch or even pitch a travel site right now, unless it was designed to help people make the most of in-town bus vacations (note to self...). But that opinion hasn't slowed the steady stream of pitches I've been hearing for vacation-planning sites. The latest: PlanetEye, a service relying on some technology spun out of Microsoft.
PlanetEye is a great site for viewing travel photos of the location you're thinking of going to. It is also supposed to help you find the cool things to do once you've got a location for your trip narrowed down. Then you can save your finds into a "Travel Pack" that you can easily retrieve when it's ready to embark on your voyage. You can also share your plans with the other people on your trip, so they can contribute to building your hit-list of things to do as well.
PlanetEye is good for scouting photos of a vacation destination, but less good at finding restaurants and attractions.
The site uses Microsoft Maps, and does a nice job of displaying trip photos from other users. But I found it frustrating to use the map to look up attractions and restaurants. Each item (or collection of closely grouped items) on the map is represented by a dot, but there's no way to know what the dots stand for without clicking on them, and even when you do, the information you want displays in a navigation bar, not on the map as you'd expect. It's hard to correlate the navigation bar text with the map. This design sucks the fun out of exploring a destination, and, to me, defeats a primary purpose of the site.
If you want a more typical travel guide experience, though, PlanetEye does offer that. There are City Guides for popular destinations, with the usual lists of most popular tourist attractions. Many major cities also have Local Expert pages, which feature more personal guides. Items you find in either of these guides can be added to your Travel Packs.
Coming up soon will be integration with more data sources, such as OpenTable, StubHub, WaySpa, and Wine Spectator. And the Travel Packs may get smarter, and start to suggest items to you based on what you have already added to them and what you say about yourself in your profile. I'd wait until these new features are added, in mid-July, to rely on this product for planning trips.
Related stories:
TravelMuse tells you where to go (on vacation)
Offbeat Guides: Build your own travel books
TripIt aggregates your travel info
See also: Dopplr, TripAdvisor, Tripbase, TravelMuse.
The site has useful, but typical, city guides.
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