MyGlobalCity

Your World Daily Planner March 21, 2006

What’s On When has taken a novel idea and turned it into a website. What they’ve done is turned themselves into a storehouse of upcoming events all over the world. Events are searchable through a number of means, including a world map, by continent, country, city, theme, and date range. Quite comprehensive, I’d say.

The one thing it doesn’t have is the ability for someone to enter a search string. The themes are predefined, so you’d have to sift through a page of listings to maybe find what you’re looking for. However, maybe they’ll add features in time.

What’d be really nice to see, from a global village perspective, is an integration of the information on this site with a way to book a trip. For example, say that the Bogota Theatre Festival has piqued your interest and you want to go. You’ve checked your day planner and have your credit card ready to pay with.

Well, WhatsOnWhen does have links for booking flights/ packages, tickets, hotels, cars for hire, travel guides and insurance. But there’s no binding between the event that you’re looking at and the booking links.

If WhatsOnWhen integrated bookings with the events, and we could click a “plan my trip” button, they’d have a killer global village Internet application. Sure, it would require some programming and parterning effort, but they could strike up partnerships with travel-related businesses and take a percentage for the brokering. (The domain planmytrip.com is taken, but there didn’t seem to be a website, when I checked.)

I don’t know how they acquire their information, but there’s a scarcity of event listings for small cities (at least in North America). But I assume that in time, they’ll add more cities and events, as they acquire more contributors. Speaking of which, if you speak English and at least one other European language fluently, they’re looking for freelance writers for 1-4 days/wk, provided you’re willing to work in London, England. Although why they don’t want remote contributors, I don’t know.

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