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California wine country is the first subject in a Web series from Area, which will steer users away from the hoi polloi.
Online Traveler: A guide to getting away from them all
It seems almost every travel guide offers a glimpse of California's famed Napa and Sonoma region, the wine country that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
Now a new online company, Area, is offering a Web guide downloadable to a laptop, iPhone, or smart phone for the style-conscious traveler who wishes to avoid the tourist hordes.
The Napa-Sonoma guide - at www.area-daily.com - was launched last month. Area plans to follow by the new year with guides to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, with a plethora of big cities in the United States and Europe coming in 2010.
Area's founders say their guides are an antidote to paper guidebooks and their online supplements. They pledge to update their information every three months and promise stylish dining, exclusive shopping, and boutique hotels for the discerning consumer.
"Think of it as having a well-connected friend who shows you all the secret spots and local favorites," the company says in its promotional materials.
That friend is a downloadable, digital brochure that makes great reading, even if you have no intention of leaving your armchair. The 30-page Napa-Sonoma version is beautifully photographed and costs $9.99. It can be printed out, but, for the paper-averse, it also contains live links that let users book a hotel room or make dinner reservations from the comfort of their own PDAs.
Of course, there are many online guides to California's famed wine country. The popular Frommer's guide - www.frommers.com/destinations/napavalley/0111010001.html - allows users to share its content on social-networking sites and has links to hotel reservations and car rentals. Like Area, Frommer's has photos, maps, and a dash of history, though Frommer's also has a thicket of ads, some of them distractingly animated.
The local site www.winecountry.com helps users buy wine and find art openings, wine tastings, and other events.
What really sets Area apart is the way it distills the hectically crowded offerings of this tourist mecca. With in-depth information on relatively few wineries, hotels, and restaurants, and a page on hard-to-find wines produced in limited quantities, Area "is about avoiding tourists," says Christine Magda, a spokeswoman for the site.
Area also offers a "valet" trip-booking service to help users find personalized tours, promising hard-to-find experiences such as seating at Fashion Week in Paris and dove-shooting in Argentina.
And if you decide not to ski at Chamonix or pick truffles in Italy, vignettes from luxurious valet trips past make great reading.
Other travel guides "give you touristy spots and not the places that necessarily are indicative of your stylish people who are in that particular city," Magda says. "It's about people who have a desire to look out for different, unique things that stand out, that aren't done everywhere else."
Online Traveler: Cool Web Sites
What: Horse stable facilities that have human lodgings, across the United States.
Why: It's hard to put a horse in a hotel room. Some people like to take vacations with their horses, so this is a good source of destinations.
How: Click on a state, and a list of stables comes up. Many of the stable compounds have bed-and-breakfast-type lodgings or campgrounds on site.
What: Comprehensive resource for special-needs travel.
Why: Travel with oxygen? A wheelchair? This site is a starting point for finding trips, accommodations, agents for special-needs travel, cruises and more.
How: Most helpful are the first-person reviews and the list of accessible tour companies around the world.
What: Phone numbers for the fraud/lost card divisions of Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, no matter what country you are calling from.
Why: Helps travelers who lose their credit cards know how to report the loss - because most lose the number when they lose the card.
How: Click on which continent and country you are in and get the phone number.
What: Best place to look for latest airfare deals.
Why: Monitors airfares and trends - and explains when so-called deals actually aren't. You can sign up for alerts on deals from your city.
How: Best feature is the ability to look at the latest deals from your departure airport. There's no guarantee you'll actually get every fare - but it's handy if you are flexible on dates and destinations.
What: Perhaps the greatest site ever created about how to travel by train. Has information on train travel in countries around the world.
Why: Created by British railway expert Mark Smith as his personal Web site, it isn't selling anything, so the information is unbiased.
How: Explains how the train systems work, gives you links, shows maps, and gives advice.
- Ellen Creager, Detroit Free Press
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