Hyperlocal Travel with Damien Tanner

Damien Tanner is an enthusiastic web technologist with the passion for travel. He is the CEO and founder of 5Places.com 5Place started out of his desire to share the hidden gems he’s found on his travels. Now it’s his mission to engage as many people as he can in sharing their favorite places in cities around the world. I caught up with him and did an interview with him about his work and projects.

I love the idea of 5places.com Rather get people to list every
special place that someone particular city your getting them to list
just five. Is this the idea behind 5places.com?

Exactly, the idea was sparked when I found myself constantly having to
trawl though the existing recommendations sites out there, trying to
find the interesting places to find. You see the all the sites out
there which collect user’s ratings for restaurants, cafes and so on
are very good at identifying the most popular place, the most reliable
place to have dinner, but whenever I travel I’m looking for something
interesting, a new experience. I found that no matter how many ‘top
rated’ places I saw on sites or recommended places in official travel
guides, by their very nature, they were always the over packed, over
popular places. Not that I have a problem going to a packed place, but
it has to be bloody good to warrant it ;)

It always ended up that the little random place your friend
recommended to you before you went away, was the place which stuck in
my mine. I started making lists of places friends’ recommended, and
then when I traveled I started making lists of places I had found.

{{{gold}}}

For every city I’ve visited, I’ve always brought a Wallpaper travel
guide, kind of like a little reminder to keep on my mantle piece. I
absolutely love the design of those books, and I guess you could say a
lot of inspiration comes from them. You know I really wish they would
have them available online, last time I went away I forgot the one I
brought and had to call my poor friend to read it out to me!

So 5Places is really my attempt to bring this idea of personal travel
recommendations to everyone. It’s not just about finding ‘the best’
restaurant, but finding someone who has similar taste and inspiration
to you, and has made a several lists of their favourite places in
cities around the world. You really get to understand a whole lot
about people when they have to choose just five places.

So the idea builds collective…. After you have 5 people
participate you suddenly have 25 of the best places to visit in any
one city?

By having a constraint (of 5 places) people need to really think, what
would they recommend to their friends? By giving weight to each an
every individual place recommended, we want to encourage people to
build unique lists, of places no one else on in the community has
found yet. Building a list is something we want people to take care in
doing, and in return, we want to hear the stories from other people
when they visit these places on their travels. I’m very keen to see
how far we can develop this collective of travellers, not just online,
but also on our travels as well.

I also understand you guys are working on a hyperlocal iPhone app
for 5places. Can you tell us more about this?

Releasing the iPhone app will obviously be incredibly useful, we’re
aiming to include pre-downloaded maps along with the city guides, so
when you’re overseas you can see everyones’ recommendations on the
place, without the potential extortionate data roaming costs.

What about user ratings and comments? Will this be built into the
equation as well?

You bet, these things are high up our list. Commenting, or rather,
story telling I think is essentially for building a real community. I
want people to feel rewarded for taking the time to recommend their
hidden treasures.

What do you see happening in the future for travel / local guides.
How will this grow hyperlocal networks?

It’s really about the mobile space now isn’t it. We can do a lot of
great things on the web, but then when you’re actually outside looking
for that restaurant in a foreign city, that’s when you need your guide
to be there. The majority of the services and applications out there
can give you a list of say restaurants nearby, but they have very
little consideration for what you actually like. Nike’s True City app
is a great step in the right direction but I believe they’ve missed a
real trick in creating a genuine community around it.

How do you think locality and community will change as more and more
services such as 5places keep popping up?

I want to see more people exploring! If we can encourage people to
visit that funny looking cafe down the side ally, we will have
succeeded. By giving people the little nudge in the right direction,
we can see those wonderfully hidden places and people in the cities we
visit.

Any last thoughts or comments?

Well I know you’ve got at least 5 places in your favourite city which
you’d love to tell us about. We’d be delighted to see your
contributions at 5places.com