Using TT to research a travel itinerary

Topic split: Cheap travel options from Munich to Marseille

It is absolutely amazing to me the lengths that people will go to research and post information that is freely available to everyone for people who are apparently just too lazy to make the effort themselves. Y'all deserve some sort of award.

I'm going to get TT to plan all my holidays from start to finish from now on. No more comparing prices or having to go to tiresome travel websites or check timetables or Google things on my own anymore. Maybe I'll even ask somebody to come round and pack my suitcase for me too, I'm having trouble deciding which swimsuit to take... and I might need directions to the airport too...can somebody loan me 20€?

Georgiagirl, how is your day? I can loan you €20. But seriously though, I've learned not to ignore the power of collective intelligence. You can be sure that I googled around looking for cheap travel deals before I resorted to the forum. But that aside, this very forum exists because people realise the usefulness of collective intelligence. With the growth of communication technology, this concept is becoming more powerful. If communicating with other people couldn't help them make more intelligent choices, even when information on things like apartments and car rentals is 'freely available', this forum wouldn't exist. Recently, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence was opened, and its research goal is to find out how people can take advantage of the possibilities brought about by modern communication technologies to act more intelligently than an individual on his/her own would do. So instead of lurking behind an anonymous username in a forum waiting to trivialise the helpfulness of other people's answers, keep yourself busy with something more important. I probably sound offensive and I apologise for that.

'Collective intelligence'... so that's what you call it when other people do your work for you? And here I was thinking it was just called laziness. Thanks for educating me.

That's a common mistake many people make here. Most of the regular posters are not actually just anonymous users but well known and socially active people in the various regions of Germany and elsewhere. You appear to have joined the site yesterday so in short, what would you know? I probably sound offensive but I make no apologies for that. Toytown as a discussion forum is perhaps unusual like that. Most of it's regular members meet up and socialise together and are not simply sitting in front of a screen conversing in cyberspace.

Thanks for keeping us posted on your plans. Do continue to keep us up to date so that the collective intelligence of TT can customise a travel itinerary to meet your specific travel needs.

Georgiagirl? What´s your deal? Gee, lay off. What is a Chat Forum for anyway? Let´s all get along, and help each other out. If you don´t feel like giving advice, then don´t respond at all. Often times people have done their research, but it doesn´t hurt to ask others to see if you may have missed something. Anyway, that´s just my two cents. Have great day in sunny Munich!

The answer is in the question. A chat forum is for chatting. Discussion. Sometimes heated discussion. Advice and information is a by-product.


Hmm. You’ve been a member of TT for how long? Since May. Right. Well then perhaps you’ve not had enough time on the forum to realise that this isn’t one of those happy fluffy places where we all hold hands and agree on every topic and sing campfire songs. There’s a lot of opinion and disagreement and that’s what makes this site interesting.


Again, I’m not here to dispense advice. I am happy to help people out, but generally not in situations where all the information they need can be easily obtained by doing a bit of research on the Internet. Too many people expect to have everything just handed over to them with no effort on their part.

Also realise that there are a lot of people, like the original poster kokosnuss (who, by the way, had been a member of TT for a whopping ten whole minutes before posting his/her question) who join the forum just to have their question answered and then bugger back off never to be heard from again. So sorry if I’m not falling all over myself to help a complete and total stranger who has never previously contributed to TT and appears to not have done any independent research before asking their question.

And while I’m at it – exactly how much have you contributed to this forum? How much knowledge or advice have you shared? From what I can see it looks like you've busy asking questions. So I'm not sure you're in much of a position to be lecturing anyone.

Searching google isn't exactly effort, either. I don't see the problem with people asking on here as they might pick up local tips that they otherwise wouldn't have got. If you don't want to help someone plan a trip, then don't help. If no-one helps, the thread drops out of the top list pretty quickly and the person learns that they've been ignored. If people do want to help, even if it's just plugging relevant German words into google, then why not?

I don't have a problem with people asking for travel tips either. In fact I've done the same, as I like to get insider tips and info from the TT crowd, who tend to be well-traveled. In turn, I often post rather long and detailed information / reviews on the trips that I take, in the hopes that someone will benefit from my experience. For example:

GG in Manhattan
GG in Paris
GG in Egypt

The point is that there is a difference between asking for opinions, experiences and tips, and asking TT to plan your travel for you (research timetables, pricing, etc.) I see nothing in the Munich-Marseilles topic that could not have been found independently with a minimum of effort.

If TT was just another place for people to ask questions that could easily be answered elsewhere, it'd be awfully boring. Plus, the more the site is cluttered up with silly useless questions, the less time and energy (not to mention willingness) people may have for answering the useful ones.

Nor the ability of individual stupidity to thwart it.

The problem is that the answers to these questions are always the same. It doesn't matter whether it's Munich to Marseille or Berlin to Amsterdam, the options are always:

1. DB
2. Whichbudget
3. Kayak
4. Eurolines
5. Mitfahrgelegenheit

Repeating this information every time someone wants to travel from A to B gets pretty tiresome after a while.

I´ve seen it before. Lively internet communities drop dead, when they become fashionable and get overrun by selfish <beep> who dont contribute. Therefor I can understand gg´s concern. In fact there are other TT members who normally act as very mean watchdogs. As much as I sometimes disaprove of their rudeness, I think they are doing a good job. You should feel lucky when you only get admonished charmingly by gg.
Oh btw - for standard travel questions, there are useful forums at www.virtualtourist.com.

I received some fantastic advice from Cinzia last year on where to go in Rhodes In fact we are going back to the very same place this year. I am in fact just about to ask for similar advice re Turkey...so I do appreciate this other facet of TT as well as arguing about engagement rings

a) Chat forums are for different things. That's like asking what a telephone is for. It might be for ringing your friend for a chat, it might be for calling emergency services, it might be for phoning your ex at 3am to scream obscenities or it might be for calling the Deutsche Telekom helpline...at 3am to scream obscenities.

2) This one is for many and varied discussions amongst Germany's English-speaking crowd (says so on the tin). It is not simply a helpline.

iii) Why should I want to get along with someone I don't know and currently don't respect because they just walked into my house five minutes ago and asked me where the kettle is.

Four) I may not feel like giving advice but I might feel like admonishing you for not using the search engine. Actually that is advice in its own right. I may feel like just making a smart-arsed comment. It is a relatively open forum with moderation carried out according to policy by a group of willing souls. Outside of their actions I am free to write whatever I want, as you are too.


Then it wouldn't hurt for them to indicate that they have done so. More often than not it is quite clear from the post that the person has done no research of their own whatsoever.

i'm not sure about planning a whole itinerary, but there's something nice about being able to get a quick and easy real life comparison on cheap travel deals. i know its usually a long shot and by the time you see what your looking for its outdated. but airline ticket prices for example seem to go up and down a bit like stocks. you check some site like kayak one day and it's all like 900€ flights to the u.s. and then you check it another day and it's like damn €500, that seems pretty good. if some service suddenly unloads a bunch of cheap fares onto the market and somebody tells me about it, i'll be pretty happy. it's defiantely not the case that some particular website is allways the cheapest on any given day. i don't check all these travel sites every day, but i at least pop into tt for brief look around the different forums on most days.

Hello people,

Many of the comments here are right, to some extent. Even Georgiagirl"s comments. Even mine. I however think that its unfair to say that I did not do any research. Georgiagirl is absolutely right when she (I"m assuming that she is indeed a girl and apologise in advance if she isn"t) says that I am a newbie in this forum. But how did I come across the forum? Through her favourite search engine. TT has a very low rank when use a combination of the keywords Munich and/or Marseille and/or Travel (that might have changed since I started my previous thread, I don"t know). Before I found TT, I ran into a gazillion other websites offering "cheap' travel options and 'advice'. I did a lot of research instead of working. When I found TT, there were all these random posts about someone looking for something etc. and no one was complaining. It seemed fine to me to make a post about cheap travel options on an easygoing forum. I did not offer a lot of extraneous information hoping to get some creative advice. I could have been wrong and was possibly wrong. I got really good advice that I did not find in the many websites I visited. That said, I found Georgiagirl"s comments rather harsh. Here were some guys making some really good contributions to the thread and she comes in and implies that they must be some fools hoodwinked into digging up free information for a lazy bum. I did not think that any of the people who gave me advice are fools. I first of all thought her comment was motivated by some kind of attention seeking personality disorder. Or a bad day. The reason is, there are very, very many other posts here with people asking for information that could be found elsewhere. Many of those people are just trying to make good choices. If Georgiagirl responded to each and every post of that nature, she would be busy making posts for a while. As a matter of fact, she would and probably did already contradict herself. When I started to reply to her comment, I deviated and shouldn"t have done it.

Now, I believe that Georgiagirl is right when she says that some people just make posts without researching. Her style of answering might have clouded her argument much as I"m clouding mine. Also, this forum isn"t a helpline. Its a chat/discusssion forum.

But in the end of it all, no one is absolutely right and let"s be aware of that. Everyone is free to have a different opinion. So, long live the forum!

I must admit, I can understand kokussnuss up to a point here. One of the problems with Google and co. is that one can be overwhelmed with thousands of results in such a search. Apart from that, the results of a Google search are often contradictory. Finally, not everybody is familiar with all the internet possibilities. I have a thread running at present which illustrates both the last points nicely. Google swamped me and I had never heard of qype until this thread, but as it turned out, even qype was not enough on its own, personal experience is always more valuable.

Speak for your bloody self. I for one am always right. About everything. Absolutely.

I thought that was our resident sage, Bad Doggie, he of the universe spanning intellect!

I think there's a hell of a lot of lazy question-asking here, and not just about travel. It's puzzling because I always assume that people must have achieved some level of self-determination in order to have transplanted themselves to a foreign country. Guess not.

But on the other hand I read pretty much every travel thread here because, though it's not exactly the last word, it's at least an interesting word, and there tends to be a good pocket of well-traveled, open-minded, value-for-money and/or spoiled people here whose recommendations I'm more interested in than many who post on TripAdvisor, for example.

my favourite question so far has been: what is the weather like in munich during the oktoberfest?

GG, i am with you.