Provence: Community Websites and Message Boards
Certainly, there is nothing more helpful that connecting with other travelers to learn from their experiences and collaborate on destination activities.
A website that set the tone for our Provence trip was Slow Travel. Slow Travel dedicates itself to developing a community of travelers who enjoy the opportunity to blend in with the local crowd at their destination. They emphasis staying for longer periods in fewer places, renting apartments or staying in B&Bs instead of hotels, and elicit a wide variety of reviews from their community members.
The help of community members on their messages boards has been essential to getting a feel for activities from someone “on the ground”. It is easy to search, well organized into broad categories, and does not update so fast that you feel that you need to spend all day monitoring the board in order to glean useful information. Community members are supportive with their suggestions as well as positive and upbeat. Compared to other community websites and message boards, Slow Travel provides a greater variety of information and experiences outside of Paris.
When joining a community, go in slow. Read many posts, do searches on the topics most important to you, but most of all make sure that the tone of the posts is fitting to your personal style. There will always be members of a community that you may not get along with, but a community should always reflect your values and attitudes.
Other message boards include:
Frommer’s – Frommer’s has a message board that is organized at the country level but is very Paris heavy. The France message board is one of their most active boards.
Fodor’s – Fodor’s suffers the same as Frommer’s. While there is quite a bit of information it is not as easily organized for browsing and conversations are frequently repetitive of information already discused or presented on the website. But, it has an active France message board.
Rick Steves – Perhaps one of the most prolific travel experts in America, his site provides two types of message boards. The Graffiti Wall is strictly limited to advice on a wide variety of topics as created by the website curators. The second board is strictly for user questions. I like this delineation between the two purposes of community boards. I also like that, while many seasoned travelers don’t necessarily need it, Rick Steves makes Europe accessible to even the newest traveler.
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