I stayed up late planning my European motorcycle trip last night. I found some amazing curvy roads in the Alps, Northern Italy, Austria and Switzerland to be specific. However, this brought up a question in my mind – something that the current GPSs can’t yet do – how do you find inexpensive accommodation in areas you’ve never been to before? Especially if you have little possibility to do any planning before hand?

Back in the early 2000s I had a business idea that I’d begin building mobile travel guides with the help of locals in the Nordic countries. At that time I was working with World66 guys to create mobile guides from the material they put on their sites. Back then mobile phones didn’t read PDFs that well, so I created their mobile guides in another format. Nevertheless – the reason behind this was of course the fact that mobile internet was still in its infancy and it was very hard to find information when you were on the road (unless you visited an internet cafe and had a visit online with a proper computer).

So how do you come across a problem like this? You create small files that readable with mobile devices, such as a phone, an iPod or a PDA. The files are updated in real time from the database of services such as wikitravel and world66 (both sites are community updateable so the information is, or at least in theory should be, up-to-date). Well, the sad part was that I never moved on with my plan back then – it was hard enough to find people to believe in my idea, let alone find a partner to move forward with the business idea.

Back to last night. I was looking at the curvy roads in Switzerland, Austria and Northern Italy and wondering if they’d have any hostels around that area. Even though I’ve been working for several years, I prefer to stay in hostels when ever I’m on a roadtrip or something similar. Why? I don’t need the luxury the hotels give me and more than usually, the hostels are really good standard and have safety boxes etc. to store your belongings. Last, but not least – you meet the best people in those places and they have a ton of stories to share. So I was looking for hostels and visited my favorite site for that – Hostelling International.

At the same time I was chatting with my friend who moved to Montpellier with his family for a few months and whining about the difficulty to find sights, places to stay at, places to eat at, etc when you’re on the road. He shared my thoughts. I was clicking around the Hostelling International website when I found their mobile hostel guides that they make available on their site for travellers. It goes hand in hand with the idea of living inexpensively (when was the last time you were overseas and roamed 5 to 10 megs data?). The guides are even laid out so that they are easily readable on a mobile phone – instant win!

This brought me back to thinking about the original business idea I had in the early 2000s. Since then, there have been some attempts at doing this but not that many have succeeded in it yet. I think people still prefer books, and I agree – I do too. However, I don’t have the luxury of carrying books with me when I’m on the road with my moto. I’ve got about 60 litres of space to carry my belongings – that’s not too much for three weeks, hence the digital guides that take no extra physical space. Also, books weigh quite a lot, so I’m going to with printed maps etc.

I reckon there’s still a lot of demand for mobile solutions in the travel industry. The travel industry is relatively well saturated with different online solutions, but I haven’t seen that many mobile solutions (online or offline) yet. Nokia is taking it’s steps with Nokia Maps, which has still some way to go – especially when it’s hard to understand how I can add points of interest to the database and how business owners are able to update their information. Google is slightly further with this, updating its database from the public but there is a flaw using the service internationally – the operators. Roaming data costs make the service off limits for the average consumer.

There’s definitely room for improvement – any tips on good mobile travel companies?

Photo by regolare (CC: by-nc-nd).