LocalWeekender shares ‘off-the-beaten-path’ places

Word-of-mouth travel recommendations have been shown to be an effective way to direct travellers to “unknown” gems, and locations “off the beaten path”.

LocalWeekender is a free, community-based website site for ‘word-of-mouth’ recommendations. It’s an online guidebook of local, outdoor spots and weekend trips. Spots might be a quiet place to read a great book, a favourite jogging route, a small, tucked-away restaurant with a great dessert, or an un-named snowshoe trail.

Battle Creek , for example, is a great place to simply relax and walk. Sites are limited to the USA at present, not all are yet populated with recommendations, but I can see this site’s formula easily extend to other countries. The site’s webmaster emailed me and plans to include Canada very soon.

Roger A. Brooks‘ Rule 16 “The Rule of telling stories” states that ‘Great stories make the campfire memorable.’ Does your site tell a story? Sometimes it’s the little things that make a place special. I recall my unplanned visit to a small museum in Skagway, Alaska, 100 years after the great Alaskan gold rush. The museum was quaint, but the young curator told me the greatest story about the local Klingit Indians. That story made my museum visit indelibly memorable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday 26 July 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Website/Event, BEFORE the visit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.