1. She’s done her maths. She knows that the Groupon voucher breaks even for her, at best. That’s all. There’s no chance she’ll lose money on the deal, but if she wants to make a profit, well, …

2. Not everything you could ever want from an evening in the restaurant is on that voucher. There’s an up-sell/cross-sell strategy in place before anyone walks in the door.

3. She knows when she’s busy, and when she isn’t. There’s no point in her shipping in break-even customers when regulars are fighting for a table. For her, November is a great month to run a Groupon deal. December would be nuts.

4. She’s taken second-order effects into account. Nobody wants to eat in an empty restaurant. If her place is half-full with Grouponers on a Tuesday night, she knows that window-browsers are more likely to stop in for an unplanned dinner. Or to come back some other time, to what they see as a “popular, buzzing” local restaurant.

5. She has already decided what happens next. She has her Grouponers’ email addresses, and knows what to do with them. Groupon isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s the beginning of a relationship for her. That’s the only way it makes financial sense.

6. She’s realistic in her expectations. The money quote: “About 20% of our Groupon customers create all the complaints on the night. And they are the ones that spend nothing on top of the offer and never come back.” She’s already accounted for these customers, and shrugs them off.

None of this is rocket science. But it requires thought, planning, and a strategy, of which Groupon forms just one part. If your total strategy is “Let’s do a Groupon,” you’re going to fail. Whether Groupon itself is a sound business is beyond my ability to assess. But it strikes me that the daily-deals model can be very useful for the right small businesses. The haters are probably just doing it wrong, or shouldn’t be doing it at all.

No, not my “forthcoming projects” folder. That one’s bursting-full, thankfully. More my unforgiveably irregular postings and updates here. It’s about time, so here’s a snapshot of some of what I’ve been up to work-wise in the last couple of months.

• My regular slot in the Sunday Telegraph‘s travel Q&A column, as consumer technlogy expert, continued with two advice pieces on data roaming. There are more coming out soon, on different subjects.
• A couple of UK guidebooks I worked on last year have been published. For Frommer’s England & the Best of Wales 2012, I wrote chapters on “Hampshire & Dorset” and “North Wales”, and co-wrote chapters on “Wiltshire & Somerset” and “London”. For Frommer’s London 2012, I was lead author and wrote 3 new chapters. There are more guidebooks in the pipeline, some already listed on my Amazon author page.
• I’ve been back in Tuscany (twice), researching a piece for the Guardian (coming soon) and two new guidebooks due out in 2012, one of them a new edition of my Frommer’s Florence & Tuscany Day by Day.
• Various travel features have appeared here and there, including this slideshow guide to Britain for music lovers.

If you represent or know of anywhere (or anything) I should see or hear about, I’m always happy to be contacted by phone or email, or on Twitter. I’ll attempt to update this page a bit more regularly in future… but my record on that to date would suggest I’m wise not to make any promises. See you around.

For visitors to Italy, buying a local SIM card with internet access is as simple as 1-2-3:

1) Find a cellphone shop. All you need to do is find the tourist office or a friendly local and ask: “Sto cercando un negozio [INSERT NETWORK NAME… SEE BELOW]…?” Italians talk on their mobiles all day every day, and anywhere with more than about 100 inhabitants has a phone shop. Euronics superstores sell all the networks under one roof.

2) Remember your passport, or driving licence, or similar official ID. As well as cash or credit card, they are going to ask you for “un documento,” which they will photocopy. This is required by Italian law. If they also request a “codice fiscale” (a tax number), just tell them “sono un(a) turista.” Visitors don’t need one to buy a mobile phone.

3) Choose your network and tariff. If you’re only here temporarily, you want “una scheda ricaricabile, anche per navigare in Internet sul mio smartphone” (“a pay-as-you-go [PAYG] SIM that also connects to the Internet via my smartphone”). Make sure that you also register for a prepaid data option, as paying-as-you-browse for data is very expensive (for EU residents, not much cheaper than connecting via roaming).

As of August 2011, these are the best network-by-network deals on data in Italy:

TIM: the PAYG SIM card costs €10, which includes €5 of credit towards calls and data. The option “TIM PER SMARTPHONE” costs €2 a week for up to 250 MB of data. To activate it if you already have a TIM SIM, just text TIMSMART ON to 40916. This way avoids any “activation” charges that a shop might try to foist on you. It stays activated, automatically debiting your PAYG balance, until you deactivate it by calling TIM customer services on 119.

Vodafone: as with TIM, the PAYG SIM card costs €10, which includes €5 of credit. The data option “Mobile Internet” costs €3 per week for 250 MB… but the first week is free. You do the math. As with TIM, it renews automatically until you disconnect or run out of credit.

Wind: like TIM and Vodafone, a “SIM ricaricabile” costs €10, with €5 credit included. Wind’s “Internet No Stop Daily” option costs nothing to activate, and debits your PAYG credit €1 on every day that you connect to the Web. There’s a fair use limit, of 50 MB, and you pay nothing if you don’t use the Web on any day. Alternatively, “Internet No Stop” costs €5 to activate (free until September 4^th, 2011) plus €9 for a month of traffic up to 1 GB.

3: Known as “Tre” in Italy, 3 charges more for SIM cards, so it only really makes sense for longer stays and/or heavy users. A 3 PAYG SIM card costs €30, which breaks down as €7 for the SIM and €23 credit preloaded on it. Thirty days of data, with a 3 GB limit and a daily ceiling of 100 MB, costs just €5. Note that, in my experience, you’re more likely to have connection problems with 3 in rural areas. Cities should be fine, but if you’re lodging in the sticks, ask locally about network reception.

iPad travellers: As with smartphones, seek out a “SIM per iPad ricaricabile.” A Vodafone microSIM costs €10, which includes €5 of credit. You then have the option of paying to connect daily (€2 “al giorno” only when you use the Web; fair-use limit) or prepay for a month (€9 “al mese” for 1 GB). 3 microSIMs again are more expensive, but €5 buys you 3 GB of data which—and this is the really good bit—you can also use back home if your home country has a 3 network. Currently, that’s Australia, Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Sweden all covered by their free option called “all’estero come a casa.” I’ll leave it up to you to calculate if it’s worth packing an Italian 3 microSIM to carry home with your souvenirs and novelty grappa.

A Guide to Italian Street Names for Frommers.com:

Popes and lovers, assassins and pacifists, artists, scholars, inventors, and industrialists: There are no set criteria to qualify for an Italian street named in your honor — though saints, like important dates in the country’s short history, are pretty much a shoo-in. Among literally thousands (including several named Via John F. Kennedy and Via “Abramo” Lincoln), here are just a handful of monikers to get you started.

Read the rest at Frommers.com

And, for the Sunday Telegraph, an answer to a reader’s question: Can I really use Groupon or similar group-buying websites to find travel bargains? The answer, of course, is yes you can.

More soon.

Q: “I know it should be possible to save money by shopping around for flights. But what’s the best website for finding deals? There are so many to choose from these days.”

Answer:

It wasn’t so long ago that the terminal operated by a high-street travel agent was the gatekeeper to all our holiday bookings.

Then along came online travel agents (OTAs), such as Expedia and Travelocity, with websites that allowed us to search for ourselves. However, an OTA isn’t usually the cheapest place to find a flight deal online. A newer breed of site known as the “meta-search engine” provides (in theory) a more comprehensive service.

These meta-search engines trawl hundreds of airline websites, OTAs, flight-data wholesalers and other search engines to find the best price. But which one finds the cheapest flight most often?

Read the rest, and the results of my test, at Telegraph.co.uk

I won’t lift directly from the piece, as it’s not online, so pasted below are transcripts of the answers I gave to the interview questions. My meanderings were (quite rightly) truncated for the final feature; even I had to trim some of the waffle, in retrospect, to reproduce these below. So…

Are travel writers being given different briefs, and has the type of content that publishers want changed?

Yes and no. Certainly, we’re now clear from the minute we put keystroke to page that the content we’re producing has to work in a variety of formats. Given the wide range of the Frommer’s offering, for example, that might include appearing in an app, as lead destination information on Frommers.com, or as an e-book… as well as its traditional home in the pages of a guidebook. However, the basic demand for well-crafted, timely, accurate, and informative content hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, given the poor signal-to-noise ratio of travel information on the Web, those traditional qualities demanded by a leading guide publisher are even more important. Writers and publishers who want to make a profitable living in the era of mass “free” content have to be 100% committed to quality in order to survive. Sometimes, that means a 2-hour round-trip to check the accuracy of a couple of sentences of text.

Is the commissioning process changing? Is there less work available?

The commissioning process is changing in the sense that it’s now possible to bypass it altogether. There’s more work than ever before for entrepreneurial writers, and some out there are doing a fine job of producing quality content from outside the traditional publishing industry. I write for Frommer’s, in the traditional, contracted way, and have written and commissioned iPhone travel apps for InstantCities.com in a looser way, taking a share of the profits. Both work for me. Far more than the details of the commissioning process, however, it’s the role of the editor that’s key. The editorial process is what makes the quality difference, and I’m always grateful to the people that edit my work at Frommer’s, the Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere. The carefully crafted edit, as much as the research and writing, is one of the key factors making content worth paying for.

What are the key changes as a result of the digital shift?

The explosion of digital is probably the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg. It’s an exciting time to be a travel writer, for sure. However, the proliferation of “publishers” hasn’t eroded the value in writing for a leading outlet, a name that comes with its own reputation. It’s no longer the only way to get your writing heard, of course, but it’s still the best. The exponential growth of the “travel Web” has also tweaked the nature of our job. We’re as much “curators of the best things” as “discoverers of new things” these days. Digital offers one set of tools for curating information, certainly, but print isn’t standing still either, and print design is becoming hugely important for leading readers around guidebooks. Some of the forthcoming redesigns I’ve seen from Frommer’s for 2011 are mighty impressive.

[Disc.: I mention Frommer's and the Sunday Telegraph, obviously, because I write for them. Other publishers, newspapers, and travel websites are available.]

More coming soon…

Every September, history and architecture buffs have a field day as countless private and government buildings across Britain throw open their doors to visitors – for free.

For Singapore Airlines’ SilverKris magazine; read it all at silverkris.com

One of my favourite Dorset walks takes me in and around the “ghost village” of Tyneham, by the southern coast of the Isle of Purbeck. This farming hamlet at the foot of Ridgeway Hill was requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 (the area was suited to gunnery practice), with a promise that it would be returned to the villagers after the war… It never was.

A short contribution to the Telegraph‘s “Best countryside holidays in Britain”; read it all at telegraph.co.uk

Finding the best late holiday deals online. It isn’t only tour operators’ websites that offer bargain holidays. For the best deals, you have to look farther afield.

Read it all at telegraph.co.uk

Smarter search

Searching the web means typing in words and expecting Google, Bing or Yahoo! to deliver the answer. It’s the way we’ve got used to working, but it’s not how real human beings sift information. We want to know what’s nearby, what our friends like. Improvements in local search, social search and visual search will do just that.

An Android-iPhone Shootout

Apple won’t have it all its own way this year. We’ll hear a lot more from Google’s Android mobile operating system, which is available free for phone hardware manufacturers to install. Several new handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Google itself (the Nexus One) are Android-powered.

Read it all at Telegraph.co.uk


Then read my guide to the best iPhone and Android apps, eReaders, Augmented Reality, travel inspiration websites, and freebies for travellers (also at Telegraph.co.uk).

@hackneye (me): Being right more of the time is what guidebooks do better than the Web. It therefore makes me sad to see one with horrendous errors.
@EverywhereTrip (Gary): I’d disagree that they get things right more than the web. They are always 1-4 years out of date given the publication cycle.

@hackneye: Yes, they can be, and sometimes that’s important. But they also tend to be researched and fact-checked more carefully.
@EverywhereTrip: So long as the public can edit the info, errors can be corrected quickly online. 1,000′s of people checking instead of 1.

@hackneye: I agree. But the public don’t correct most of the travel content on the Web. Hence the variable quality.
@EverywhereTrip: What is an example of this? Most pages have comments, or at least a way to contact the owner.

@hackneye: An example of what? An uncorrected error on a travel site? Just Google your hometown and dig around.
@EverywhereTrip: That’s the thing. I don’t see much incorrect information. People always give theoretical examples, never concrete ones.

@hackneye: Chelsea’s football ground is the site of a battle that took place 200 miles away: http://bit.ly/agSoZN… Michelangelo’s David is in the Uffizi: http://bit.ly/aq8Vfn [it isn't]. 2 quick searches, 2 highly ranked sites.

@EverywhereTrip: So leave a comment correcting the information problem solved.
@hackneye: I admire your idealism. It’s a fine quality. But I suspect ‘correcting the Internet’ is too big a job.

@EverywhereTrip: The internet is a work in progress. If you see an error, correct it. Everyone does a little bit and it adds up…

And so it continued, with a 140-character limit becoming increasingly unsatisfactory for expressing quite complex ideas. It never really occurred to me that my opening gambit was controversial. I’ve worked with guidebooks for years, and have seen (and, yes, made) sloppy errors. Have any made it as far as print? Sure, a few. But I’m certain I’ve never seen the kind of howlers that I discovered with 2 cursory searches on Google. I’ve never seen a guidebook that claims David is in the Uffizi; almost anyone who’s even read about Florence knows that. Nobody needs a guidebook, of course, and Google (heck, even Yahoo!) easily beats one for up-to-date pricing information. But a well crafted guide (like a history book) can enrich a visit; to compare the Blue Guide to Tuscany, say, with a Google search is to commit an obvious category error.

Further, I can think of at least 6 reasons that we’ll never be able to rely on travel information pulled from a search:

1. The Internet’s strength is also its weakness from a travel information point of view. It’s unedited and (partly) democratic. Ten cheers for that. However, there is no democracy of facts, facts need checking, then double-checking… and fact-checking means editors.
2. The Web follows something like a geometric pattern of growth. The number of people willing to spend their time editing it, for free, is more likely to grow arithmetically. There’s an incompatibility there; we could play whack-a-mole with mistakes forever.
3. The kinds of financial returns available online aren’t conducive to thorough destination research, at the moment and for the most part anyway. Patrick Smith has documented the UK launch of Demand Media on his blog, and the pay for experts at leading travel portals isn’t significantly better. (Not because those running such sites are rapacious capitalists; far from it. They’re professional outfits that have done the maths and worked out what a page is worth in traffic and click-through revenue.)
4. Visitors to travel sites are seeking information, inspiration and enlightenment. They don’t know; that’s why they’re there. They aren’t equipped to spot errors (a classic adverse selection problem).
5. When it comes down to it, why should we spend time correcting the errors of content creators who can’t even be bothered to check Wikipedia? (Even to read the Battle of Stamford Bridge, paragraph one.) If it’s your job (or your hobby) to provide quality, well-sourced travel information, then do your job. Visitors to your site aren’t there to correct your errors, and readers are generally not likely to help people with such cavalier attitudes to quality.
6. There’s just far too much information out there, much of it contradictory, much of it abandoned by its creator, and most of it easy to find with the right search term. This is an inevitable consequence of the Web’s DNA.

It strikes me as a truism that the quality of Web information available for free (or nearly-free) will improve. Algorithms will get better, the semantic Web may help push us to better quality sites. And, as Gary points out, crowdsourcing does work. We can agree on that. Individual travel sites will improve (and there are already good ones) and challenge the established names. One way some disruptors are doing so is by becoming editorially more like the traditional players.

I make a significant slice of my income writing on, or about, the Web. I use it all day, every day, and have done for over a decade. To see it as a ‘work in progress’ is to fundamentally misunderstand its nature, in my opinion. (Incidentally, some Marxists and neoconservatives make exactly that mistake with ‘history’… but that’s another subject.) I’m certainly not fixated on the professionally-produced guide as book, app, or whatever. It’s the message that’s key, not the medium. And unless I’m very wrong, the message we receive from the Internet won’t ever be ‘corrected’.

This is only a first draft of my opinion. Please feel free to use the box below to correct me.