When researching about a city before visiting for the first time, it can be hard to get a sense of what places to try, and what places to avoid. Sites like Yelp and CitySearch can only go so far in conveying the essence of a place. TurnHere lets visitors vibrantly see places with streaming videos backed by professional filmmakers.

Similar in style to the recently reviewed Rooftop Comedy, TurnHere focuses on quick and easy video browsing, except this time, the topic is travel and locations. Basically, they hire filmmakers with either professional or prosumer equipment, and with a passion for travel, to submit videos documenting cool places to visit. Businesses can also buy shooting time from TurnHere to promote themselves.

This all sounds like a pretty typical film production company, but, what’s different about TurnHere is that they make all the films available free on the web, supported by ads. Currently, most of the videos congregate around New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with a long tail sprinkled around the rest of the US. Most videos are around 5 minutes long, and try to be entertaining while providing relevant information.

The interface is spot on, allowing users to easily browse videos in different cities. The videos are delivered using a flash based player, and they’re fast to start.

What we’re seeing is traditional film production companies turning to the web for content delivery, which is great for the consumer, since it gives them more flexibility and options. But, in the end, companies like TurnHere have not scratched the surface of user generated media (which is what YouTube is solely focused on). Not everyone can be a TurnHere filmmaker.

What I would love to see is a video-based Yelp. Alongside textual reviews and photos are user-uploaded videos reviewing businesses. I’ve already seen many videobloggers doing it on their individual blogs. Heck, I’ve even done a video review on my blog about a popular sushi restaurant in Palo Alto (don’t laugh, I used my dinky little Canon Elph). I believe that there’s enough passion amongst the video blogging crowd to make a very valuable video reviews site. Someone like YouTube just needs to provide the bandwidth and infrastructure, and we’ll be set to go.

Coordinating the logistics for a group trip can be a nightmare. Between coordinating travel dates, flights, hotels, and itineraries, you’ll probably end up losing days of productivity and sanity. It’s time to see if online travel management sites can help out.

There are lots of travel sites that can help you find hotels and flights, like Kayak. And then, there are travel social networking sites that let you read and write reviews about various travel destinations, like TripConnect, TravBuddy, and Epic Trip. However, none of these sites can really help you plan and manage the nitty-gritty details of your trip. There are two trip management sites that I’m aware of that can do this: Triporama and TripHub.

Triporama lets you manage the basic elements of your group trip. There are entry boxes to record traveling details such as arrival/departure information, accommodations, and activities. You can also manage who will be traveling with the group, and send out blanket emails with announcements.

This is all well and good, but the problem with Triporama is that the details of the trip must all be entered using simple text boxes. In essence, the interface is no different than using multiple text files to handle your trip planning. It would be nice to incorporate some information awareness by automatically pulling in flight data, or even simply pre-filling the text boxes with specific dates and locations. For free form data, it’s always best to implement some type of wiki. For example, the itinerary could be an all accessible wiki page that anyone can add their suggestions for things to do.

Triporama also provides trip ideas, which is basically a portal to travel sites that offer pre-paid vacation packages, many of whom Triporama is an affiliate with. In the end, Triporama is just too basic for any kind of complex travel management, and seems to be more of a front door to lure you into buying their affiliated vacation packages.

TripHub has more management features than Triporama. It has all the basic functionality: email lists, flight information, and hotel information. But, it does all this with a more sophisticated data entry interface, allowing you to fill in exact dates, number of guests, addresses, and much more. You may not think that this is a big deal, but when it comes to multiple people entering data, it’s best to constrain and guide their text inputs so that it will be easier to glean the relevant data later on.

TripHub also has search capabilities for flights and hotels, which is powered by Hotels.com. What’s nice is that TripHub can let you comment on hotels and let your whole group see what hotels are being considered. When it comes to emails and group polls, I’m always an advocate of only having the information entered once, rather than having to send out different emails and lists with the exact same information.

Overall, TripHub is a nicely executed site, and is suitable for anyone needing to manage a large group of travelers. For groups of 6 or less, it might be more of a hassle than a blessing to use TripHub. Most of the time, I find that using Gmail to track my conversations is enough for small groups.

If anyone else has a favorite travel management tool or technique, make your comment below. I would love to hear about it.