Offbeat Travel Guides

You might be thinking, oh great, another travel guide company. This one, however, is a little bit different. Offbeat Travel Guides are personalized and customized to you and your travel needs. Are you couchsurfing your whole trip? Well, then you can take out all the information in the hotels section. Any section(s) can be customized. they even print your name and travel dates on the cover.

It starts off with you selecting where you’re going to, where you’re coming from, and the dates you will be traveling. Building the online preview of the guide doesn’t take long, and you’re able to do all the customizing you want.

The layout of the guide is excellent. Design is clean and straightforward, not crowded with too much info. Maps with non-English alphabet (ie, China, Japan) also have the Romanized text of places along with their alphabet. They include city, neighborhood, and streetmaps for locations which really helps when trying to get around.

There is also a phrasebook section you can include if you so desire. The Japanese one I reviewed was very complete and comprehensive. It would definitely help you were you traveling to Japan. I’m sure other languages are as covered as this too.

You can then purchase the guide. They offer both real, physical travel guides and downloadable PDFs. They do keep the PDFs up as long as you keep your account with them, so if you download and delete or can’t find it, you can just go grab another copy. I only tried the PDF verson, so I’m not sure about the quality or durability of the printed version as compared to other guides. When checking out, it said if I had ordered a printed guide, it would arrive 2-3 days before I left for my trip. I don’t know if this is how they are planning things or just because it takes so long to print, but I would have liked my guide to arrive sooner.Maybe that’s why they offer the PDF as well.

If you’re traveling multiple destinations, it doesn’t look like they support multiple places right now. For example, if I’m traveling to India and then to Vietnam. It would be cool to have both places in one book and able to customize it.

Their support is good too, I’ve emailed them twice with questions and within an hour I had received a response. Props to them for that.

Overall, Offbeat Travel Guides are something I wholeheartadly recommend. I would love to hear if any of the readers here has gotten a printed guide, lemme know!

You can find Offbeat Travel Guides at http://www.offbeatguides.com