Travelers have grown quite savvy at using the Internet to research destinations, book flights and hotel rooms, post travelogues and even hook up with like-minded wayfarers. “The Internet has become the No. 1 information source for travel planning,” says Rolf Freitag, CEO of IPK International World Travel Monitor Co., which analyzes global tourism trends. “And last year, for the first time, the Internet had more bookers than lookers.” The cornerstone of this trend, information-sharing Web sites, is soaring in popularity: VirtualTourist.com has more than 430,000 members, with up to 400 joining each day; some 160,000 surfers are registered for Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum; Travellerspoint.com has more than 10,000 members from 186 countries; IgoUgo.com offers more than 80,000 travelogues. Thanks to sites like these, says Freitag, “you can be your own tour operator.”
Now travelers are going online with an even more ambitious goal: to connect with locals who can give them an insider’s view of their destinations. For a growing number of people, travel in the grand colonial style, taking an Olympian view of the landscape and barely interacting with the locals, is not the point. They want to develop a deeper understanding of another culture. And what better way to do that than to make contact with the people who live there?
Sites like VT, IgoUgo and countless local blogs allow tourists to find out things that the guidebooks might not divulge–like the favorite neighborhood pub or playground and the cheapest drugstore or self-service laundry. For Ayuri Yuasa, a 33-year-old government officer from Osaka, Japan, hooking up with online friends in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City gave her a much more authentic sense of those cities. “I [got to] know and feel the usual life from our friends–what they usually eat, where they go shopping, what’s popular among young people,” she says. “I feel as if I lived there.”
Many hosts go out of their way to make bleary-eyed tourists arriving for the first time feel as if they’re coming home. When Umer Durrani, a 22-year-old Pakistani who lives in Switzerland, recently arrived at the airport in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, at 2 a.m., he called a Saudi he had met on VT, who picked him up and drove him into town. Durrani has even been invited to stay with people he’d met only via e-mail. “In Bergamo, Italy, a VT friend of mine came to pick me and my aunt up at the railway station,” he recalls. “She showed us around the city, we stayed at her place, she cooked for us and we left in the morning.”
The more often travelers experience such hospitality, the more likely they are to return the favor. In the past year, Yuasa has met up with tourists from the Netherlands, the United States and other parts of Japan to see the cherry-blossom festival in her hometown of Osaka. “The VT community is like a second family to me,” says Durrani. And he treats other members like long-lost relatives. When he was still living in Pakistan, Durrani came upon an Internet posting from a Dutch couple who wanted suggestions for visiting the country. He promptly advised them to stop at his hometown, Lahore. “[When they got there] they called me,” he says. “I was with my cousins eating dinner, so I asked them to join us.” They ended up staying at his place, free of charge, for four days–with his tour-guide services thrown in to boot. As a result, they got an intimate view of a city buzzing with culture, historic splendor and thrilling bazaars that no guidebook could provide.
Travel Web sites are beginning to do more to help visiting and local members connect. VT members now organize so many regular bricks-and-mortar meetings that the site recently added a calendar to its home page to keep track; in March more than 50 posted gatherings were held around the world, from a dinner in Bangkok to a caipirinha party in Rio. Kuala Lumpur “VTers” get together on the last Friday of every month for drinks or dinner; all local and visiting members are welcome.
Of course, this being the online world, there are weirdos about. “Despite all the wonderful people in the world, there are also predators,” says New Yorker June Silverman, who uses CompuServe’s travel forum as well as VT. And online appearances can sometimes be deceptive. Sandy Smith, a 41-year-old scientist from West Kirby in the northwest of England, once invited an Internet acquaintance to stay, only to find out upon her arrival that she was a he–decked out in drag. “This made me more careful,” she admits.
Still, the communities formed around better-established Web sites tend to provide a safety net for those about to meet their virtual pen pals in the flesh. “You see them online daily, and you know the network around them,” says VT’s vice president of site content Giampiero Ambrosi. “You actually feel more secure–20 people you know will know them.”
Travel-site correspondences can even develop into long-term relationships. Some younger tourists use sites like Nerve.com or craigslist.org–also used for online dating–to hook up with locals. But they don’t have to be dates; You You Guo, a 38-year-old salesman from Nanjing, China, has met up with a Singaporean travel-site acquaintance both times she passed through town on business. “We ate dinner and shared our opinions,” he says. His goal is simply “to meet friends from all over the world.” Online buddies continue to nurture their ties long after their holidays are over. “If I have a friend in a country, the country seems much nearer to me,” says Yuasa. Arguments over travel, sports and world politics occasionally take place–but so do marriages (VT boasts at least three). With all the online flirting, fighting and “scrounging for attention,” says Jennifer Compton, a 55-year-old writer from Wingello, Australia, VT is like “a great big pub.” And everyone knows the local watering hole is where you go to find out what’s really going on.
