EuropaReiser is today launching the free public beta version of Stay.com, a service that lets people plan their travels and share those plans with others.
Of course, there are lots of websites and applications one can use to find out what to do when visiting a city, but Stay.com admittedly makes things very easy and quite fun for the 50 cities it currently features on the site.
All you need to is enter your destination city, e.g. Brussels, and up pops a list of activites, like museums you can visit or restaurants where you can get some decent food.
At the tap of a button, you can get a downloadable guide (PDF) of activities and venues along with a map, photos, addresses, opening hours and more. You can also customize those guides with items you select from a pre-populated list of venues, hotels, restaurants and attractions, and share your personalized guide with the world via Stay.com, Facebook and Twitter.
Likewise, you can discover custom guides for cities that other people have created before you.
Stay.com also handily integrates content from a range of travel information providers: TripAdvisor for ratings and reviews, and TopTable and OpenTable for easy restaurant reservations, just to name a few.
The startup promises much more is coming now that the service has launched in public beta form; on the roadmap we find user-added venues and places, third-party sharing widgets, full mobile integration, geo-location features, video guides and more. Stay.com promises the site will remain ad-free as the site grows in terms of functionality; the money it makes from hotel bookings from the main website should be enough to build a business, they reckon.
Other services that let you build custom travel guides one way or another include YourTour, Offbeat Guides, NileGuide, TripIt and Dopplr.
