TripAdvisor Helps You Discover Cool Places around the Corner

Have you ever noticed that while you know tons of facts that you discover when traveling abroad or in some cool places in your home country but thousands of miles from your home town, you sometimes lack knowledge about the area you actually live in? I have actually met people in Moscow that have never been to Kremlin or residents of New York that never climbed the Empire State Building. Probably this is because that we believe the places we live in are too ordinary to bother while real adventures can only happen far from home.

Today we seem to receive one tool destined to solve this problem for those who care. I have just received an exiting announcement in my inbox from TripAdvisor (in case you don’t know - which I highly doubt - it is one of the oldest and most popular travel sites in the world that has been around since 2000). Today the website has a new functionality added called “Gas Tank Getaways” to prove that there may be very interesting places just around the corner.

This new tool is intended to help find places to explore based on exactly how much gas you want to fill your tank with for a vacation (quite reasonable for anyone concerned about gas prices that seem to determine the cost of traveling lately).

What you do here is choosing the point you are in currently (from the vast TripAdvisor) database and tell the tool how much fuel you want to spend - full tank, half or quarter of it. If the area around this place has some attractions reviewed by users of the community, you will get up to five suggestions for the destinations within that range - along with distance and the amount you will pay for gas (based on current US gas prices). TripAdvisor leverages the power of its broad community by suggesting only the places recommended by other site users first. For every suggested destination you will be able to see the local guide offering hotels to stay, restaurants to dine in and various popular places of attraction - all of that with photos and reviews submitted by community members.

What I like about the Gas Tank Getaways in particular is that it offers suggestions for places outside of the US as well and even if I was unable to find anything in Russia or in some of my favorite countries in Asia, Europe is covered as well as South America so you can get suggestions for your European trip as well.

I believe that this tool has a great potential for us to discover exciting places around us but can also be used when travelling - even for business. So if you have a weekend at your disposal and a rented car without certain plans on what to visit in the country of stay you can simply tell the new TripAdvisor service where exactly you are and get a few nice suggestions recommended by other travelers.