This is first in a series of four posts, published on a Saturday, to help consumers get the best out of their holiday. I’ll soon be taking a break in Paris. It’ll be my first time visiting France, so I spent this morning looking at ideas for things to do and found a few good resources that I wanted to share.

Exploring your destination online

Travellerspoint have their wiki guides, but I found out today, if you email them with the city in the subject, a PDF guide will be sent to you. I received mine within ten minutes. Another site I found a lot of information on Paris was Simon Seeks; there are a lot of guides written by experienced travellers.

Locals do it better

You cannot beat guides written by locals (I would say that because I’m the founder of a locally written travel guide called My Life in Leeds) and Spotted by locals covers a number of European destinations, and features local attractions, restaurants and things to do.

Guidebooks are not yet dead

There’s the debate that are guidebooks dead but they are handy when you are out and about on your holiday. My favourites are the Dorling Kindersley, top 10 guidebooks. I’ll be taking Frommer’s ‘Paris Free and Dirty cheap’ guidebook with me.

I would like to see colour photos in the book, but it’s perfect for a cheapo traveller like me.

Using Twitter

Usually I will buy a guidebook at the airport and already have in my mind what I want to see. If you are on Twitter and have a group of friends or family following you, ask them for recommendations and add the suggestions to your favourites.

Travel events and info plugin

To find out about events and festivals in your destination then check out Joobili. I started using Gliider last week; it’s a browser plugin and tool that allows you to drag and drop travel info, photos, video into a folder that you can access as your researching your holiday.

Travel apps

Then there are the travel apps for your mobile phone or iPod. I don’t think it’s a good idea wandering around flashing your latest gadget, but, Lonely Planet’s guidebooks are fairly easy to read on the iPod or iPhone while sat in the airport. Lastminute.com has some good translation apps which can help.

Google maps and Streetview

One of my favourite tools is Google Streetview. It helped me find my hotel in Paris. I checked out the hotel that I was going to book on Streetview and it looked pretty grim; a few streets away I spotted another hotel which I ended up booking.

Experience the holiday destination

You can spend hours upon hours researching your next holiday destination, but at the end of the day you cannot beat just going there and witnessing it for yourself. I just like to be a little organised so I don’t spend the time wandering around looking lost.

Feel free to add your tips for exploring holiday destinations.

• Travel agents should use online tools to improve experience
• A travellers rant about Travel guidebooks
• All travel content should be available free online
• Virtual tour around Travel Rants
• Travel inspiration tips to find your holiday destination

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