Why V!VA Creates Better Travel Guides

VIVA’s mission is to inspire travelers and enable a superior travel experience by providing more up-to-date, trustworthy and relevant information than currently available through traditional printed guidebooks.

V!VA is building a better travel guide by combining the power of user-generated content, social networking and web 2.0 technologies with the traditional printed travel guidebook. The resultant website and printed guides address several of the problems that inherently plague big-name guidebook brands. Printed guidebooks were the golden standard for obtaining trustworthy travel information before the age of the Internet. Although they remain the most useful tools for detailed trip planning, they suffer from three primary weaknesses:

1) Printed guidebooks are chronically out-of-date, as the updating cycle for most is 3 to 5 years. We solve this problem by updating our guidebooks every six months

2) They suffer from a single author bias and fail to effectively integrate the experiences and recommendations of diverse travelers. V!VA corrects this by taking into account the experiences of our online community of travelers who rate and review businesses that appear on our website.

3) Their content isn’t freely available on the Internet. One must purchase a hefty, often expensive paper book. All V!VA content is accessible for free, online, but travelers may, if they wish, also purchase the printed guidebook version.

On the Ground

Unusually, V!VA is headquartered in Quito, Ecuador. With a diverse editorial staff, V!VA Travel Guides is reinventing the traditional travel guide from the ground up, working with local editors to ensure ongoing accuracy of information.

V!VA ensures the authenticity of its content in a number of ways. All field writers who contribute to V!VA Travel Guides either live in the country they write about, have spent months traveling in and getting to know the area, or are closely trained and instructed by V!VA editors through a series of travel writing workshops, or "Boot Camps", which take place on the ground and thoroughly prepare writers to effectively cover the country they are in. Here, screened, would-be travel writers the opportunity to learn how to write reviews and have on the ground practice in the country that they will write about, before going on assignment.

Colombia writer Lorraine Caputo spent six months on the ground for V!VA, thoroughly exploring all the areas assigned to her. "As a writer for V!va Travel Guides, I believe the best respect we can show to the people of a country is to have accurate information--and the only way to do that is to spend time in the country, getting to know the people and understand the country from the roots," Caputo says.

Ethics

V!VA staff and freelancers adhere to a strong code of ethics, forbidding them to accept any freebies under any circumstances. It is our belief that accepting a freebie naturally skews a writer’s opinion of a place, so freebies are simply banned.

Fraud

By tracking IP addresses and requiring all writers to submit original photos, V!VA also relies on technological solutions to detect fraud. All writing, whether submitted by on-the-ground field-writers or V!VA's extensive online community of contributors, also passes through a thorough editorial and fact-checking process.

What We Believe

We believe that traveling can be one of life’s most rewarding experiences and that cultural connections made while traveling can make the world a better place. We believe that the collective wisdom of travelers and professional writers and editors can provide the most helpful information for planning a unique and unforgettable trip.