Living Like Locals; Many holidaymakers are already accustomed to arranging their trips online. Now they're using the Web to connect with residents at their final destinations who provide everything from restaurant recommendations to a bed for the night.(VirtualTourist.com)

Byline: Malcolm Beith

Last fall 57-year-old Geoff Wright and his wife traveled from Britain to rural Pennsylvania to stay with an online buddy they'd met on VirtualTourist.com (VT). Their host drove them around for two days, showing them the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania and Penn's Cave, a limestone cavern full of stalagmites and stalactites--"places we just wouldn't have seen on a package tour," Wright says. A few days later he and his wife headed south to Gettysburg, where they met another VT contact who gave them a personalized tour of the battlefield, then hauled them off to Virginia to meet his family. From there the Wrights made their way north to Rhode Island, where they lodged with VT friend No. 3 and her family. "Without these VT friends, we would probably have just traveled to one or two places," says Wright. "Touring around with them gave us a better understanding of the American way of life."

Travelers have grown quite savvy at using the Internet to research destinations, book flights and hotel rooms, post travelogues and even hook up with like-minded wayfarers. "The Internet has become the No. 1 information source for travel planning," says Rolf Freitag, CEO of IPK International World Travel Monitor Co., which analyzes global tourism trends. "And last year, for the first time, the Internet had more bookers than lookers." The cornerstone of this trend, information-sharing Web sites, is soaring in popularity: VirtualTourist.com has more than 430,000 members, with up to 400 joining each day; some 160,000 surfers are registered for Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum; Travellerspoint.com has more than 10,000 members from 186 countries; IgoUgo.com offers more than 80,000 travelogues. Thanks to sites like these, says Freitag, "you can be your own tour operator."

Now travelers are going online with an even more ambitious goal: to connect with locals who can give them an insider's view of their destinations. For a growing number of people, travel in the grand colonial style, taking an Olympian view of the landscape and barely interacting with the locals, is not the point. They want to develop a deeper understanding of another culture. And what better way to do that than to make contact with the people who live there?

Sites like VT, IgoUgo and countless local blogs allow tourists to find out things that the guidebooks might not divulge--like the favorite neighborhood pub or playground and the cheapest drugstore or self-service laundry. For Ayuri Yuasa, a 33-year-old government officer from Osaka, Japan, hooking up with online friends in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City gave her a much more authentic sense of those cities. "I [got to] know and feel the usual life from our friends--what they usually eat, where they go shopping, what's popular among young people," she says. "I feel as if I lived there."

Many hosts go out of their way to make bleary-eyed tourists arriving for the first time feel as if they're coming home. When Umer Durrani, a 22-year-old Pakistani who lives in Switzerland, recently arrived at the airport in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, at 2 a.m., he called a Saudi he had met on VT, who picked him up and drove him into town. Durrani has even been invited to stay with people he'd met only via e-mail. "In Bergamo, Italy, a VT friend of mine came to pick me and my aunt up at the railway station," he recalls. "She showed us around the city, we stayed at her place, she cooked for us and we left in the morning."