There is no shortage of travel info online. The problem is, most of it sucks.

It seems like most online guides are either hive-minding the same corporate sponsored, ultra generic advice and must-see lists, or they have thrown out the baby with the editorial staff and publish whatever anyone, anywhere has to say about a place regardless of qualifications, bias, or grammatical expertise.

Nile Guides

NileGuide seems to have found a third option, and packed it into the best DIY guide compiler I’ve seen online.

NileGuide gets their content from local “experts” and (starting just recently) Frommer’s guidebooks, edits it in house, and then presents it in a modular format so you can create a custom guide according to your tastes. When you go to a destination on the site, you can choose to read online, to create your own guide, or to pick from guides that have been compiled by others. For example, for Prague, you can choose from guides to the “best cafes in Prague”, “Prague underground”, or “Prague spots for sports fans”. Each one is a different way of seeing the same city.

I admit to being a total sucker for all things modular, so this makes complete sense to me. I also appreciate that co-founder Josh Steinitz was quick to emphasize their commitment to objectivity and transparency. “When we give you a good recommendation, no one is paying us to say that.”
 
What they’ve grasped that other guides seem not to is that there is no such thing as a perfect guide to a city. Not only are one traveler’s tastes and interests different from one another, the same person may take very different kinds of trips. If you will be spending a semester in Tuscany, you may want a lot more and different info than if you have 48 hours in Florence, and you may want to spend those two days differently depending on whether you’ve already been there five times, or if you are, say, on your honeymoon vs. backpacking with your best friend.

Nile Guide

They’ve just released a new iPhone app. I haven’t had a chance to test it out on the road, but it looks promising. Link to NileGuide..>