Culture Trip Review [2024]: Reliable travel guide, or nah?

Culture Trip is not an unfamiliar name among travelers. You would have come across its website when brainstorming travel ideas, researching about a destination, or looking for inspirational travel guides.

We've previously reviewed travel guides like Lonely Planet and Fodors, but what exactly is a travel guide and how is it any different than travel blogs?

A great Travel guide identifies itself as a traveler’s “essential companion” that feeds users with credible travel stories. While it has increased in popularity over the years, the app has also faced a fair share of criticism regarding the originality, timeliness, and accuracy of its content.

So, in this article, we are reviewing Culture Trip, exploring its features, pros, and cons to help you determine if it’s actually a reliable source for travelers eyeing authentic experiences.

What is Culture Trip?

Founded in 2011, The Culture Trip is a UK-based company that aims to motivate people to travel more and embrace different experiences around the world. Since then, Culture Trip has become a go-to travel guide for all of the best tourist hotspots around the world.

How does Culture Trip Work?

Culture Trip provides articles, podcasts, and videos that contain useful information on destinations around the world that cover a variety of aspects such as culture, food, entertainment, heritage, accommodation, unusual attractions, and others.

Culture Trip has a large team of content creators from around the world with local knowledge and insights on places they write about. In addition, there are also many other interesting features offered by the app.

What are the Major Features of Culture Trip?

Browse Localized Travel Content 

Culture Trip prides itself on providing travel-content curated by travel experts and locals to provide travelers with insider-tips and helpful guides on destinations. This way, travelers can avoid tourist traps and over-crowded places and dive into local and authentic experiences. Moreover, it prioritizes accommodation options that align well with local culture, sustainability, and reasonable pricing.

Create Travel Itineraries

In addition to just viewing content, Culture Trip also lets users create itineraries based on travel information that’s available on the platform. Users can save or bookmark interesting attractions, hotels, cafés, and restaurants in a particular destination and build a detailed travel itinerary out of it. Once you have added everything, you can view your trip plan detailed on a map.

Place Bookings on Accommodation and Adventures

If you come across an interesting boutique or hotel, you can make reservations via the app/website by clicking the link. In addition, you can also book experiences like safari rides, kayaking tours, parasailing, etc. 

Sign Up for Virtual Experiences

A relatively newer feature that was introduced during the pandemic was the ability to book virtual experiences like online cookery classes, painting classes, meditation courses, and other similar experiences via the app. 

How Much Does Culture Trip Cost?

Culture Trip is free to use and is available in both web and mobile versions (iOS and Android). They do provide tours, but Culture Trip itself is a free source of travel inspiration and guide.

What's TRIPS by Culture Trip?

TRIPS by Culture Trip is a new venture by Culture Trip that operates similarly as tour operators, providing adventure-like tours to small groups who embrace Culture Trip's values of sharing travel experiences, making new friends, and immersing in the local, authentic culture. You can book their tours through TRIPS now!

Benefits of using Culture Trip

Interesting travel content

Culture Trip is a great place to browse for content related to unusual attractions and lesser-known destinations. For the most part, it does provide insightful tips on how to avoid common experiences and discover local flavor. Some content is also in the form of stories that are persuasive to read.

Intuitive

Based on your location, the app suggests interesting places or activities nearby for users in search of unusual attractions to explore. It improves user experience as you don’t have to search for them by yourself using filters. This is one of the popular features of the app.

Direct bookings

The fact that you can browse for good, cost-effective accommodation options and also book them via the app or website is pretty useful. The app guarantees free cancellation subject to their terms and conditions with the option of changing dates as well. It makes travel planning a step easier and hassle-free.

Free

Users can make use of Culture Trip’s features and access its content free of charge. An account is not essential for browsing content but is recommended if you need to create trip plans and save places that interest you. You can download its articles and access them offline as well.

Downsides to using Culture Trip

Duplicated content

You can come across multiple versions of the same destination or point of interest contributed by different writers. This is because Culture Trip continuously renews content based on updated information but doesn’t do a good job of getting rid of the old ones.

So, for a user, it could be difficult to sift through these and figure out what’s the most useful version to gain the required information.

Limited itinerary building feature

Culture Trip’s itinerary building has a major limitation.

In many ways, it resembles a shopping cart of an online store.

Itineraries or travel plans can only be created from options available within the platform as users cannot import travel ideas from elsewhere. We think it would be a more user-friendly travel planner if the “import” feature is available.

Questionable accuracy

It’s hard to validate if Culture Trip’s travel stories are completely accurate and timely. Users have complained of articles suggesting places that have shut down a long time prior to the publication date. Inaccuracies related to information on popular attractions have also been noted.

While the platform does claim to prioritize authentic user experiences, it generates its revenue through affiliate links – which means their selections could also be biased.

Is Culture Trip Worth it?

We believe that Culture Trip is worth considering if you're looking for an alternative to typical travel guides like Lonely Planet or Fodors! Culture Trip's travel content provides a fresh perspective on boutique & culturally immersive traveling, reflected in the TRIPS tours as well.

With Culture Trip's content being completely free and easy to navigate and use, they're a great consideration of travel guides to use when researching sights to see or places to go!

While Culture Trip's travel content is generally better, in my opinion, than general travel guides like Lonely Planet, much of their content is duplicated and not very unique since different writers publish their content on the platform. There are also Culture Trip reviews online that point to the question of legitimacy and authenticity of Culture Trip's content that travelers should be aware of.

With that being said, if you consider that not all of their content is perfect, they're definitely worth checking out, especially since they're a free source of inspiration!

Our Rating: 3.9/5

Pros:

• Free!
• Large database of travel resources
• Intuitive Apps
• Integration of TRIPS tours.

Cons:

• Repetitive content
• Bad for Itinerary building
• Questionable accuracy

Alternatives to Culture Trip

We think Culture Trip is a great platform to seek inspiration for your travel bucket list as it has informative and interesting content on different destinations around the world. But there are plenty of alternatives out there.

For example, recent popular travel publications such as CNTraveler & Atlas Obscura are great alternatives to check out!

While they're a great platform to seek inspiration, they're not constantly and daily updating their travel content. We are! Check out our travel blog now!

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