Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. We carefully select partners to work with to process bookings. These partners are the leaders in the field and process large a large number of bookings every day. All bookings are handled over encrypted connections to protect your details.

Hostels are an inexpensive form of short-term accommodation, especially suited to individual travellers who don't mind sharing a room ('dorm') with other travellers. Some hostels also offer private rooms, usually with a shared bathroom. They are especially popular amongst younger travellers, but unless specified otherwise, most don't have upper age restrictions.

Yes. Hostel cards just help you get discounts at select hostels.

We do not have direct access to the properties' phone numbers. When you make a booking, the phone number is included on your confirmation email.

No, Travellerspoint membership is not required, but why would you not want to be a member?!

If you want to review a property you have stayed at, Travellerspoint membership is required. When you leave your review using the same details emailed to you after you placed your booking, your review is automatically marked as a Trusted Review, which carries a lot more weight in our ranking of properties.

Our accommodation listings are from Booking.com so you will need to make your changes there. The update will automatically display on Travellerspoint. If you have no recollection of signing up your property, please contact us and let us know on which page your property is showing.

Dorms are shared rooms, particularly at hostels. Private rooms are not shared, as the name suggests. Ensuites include their own bathroom.

Travellerspoint does not process the bookings itself but uses several different systems. Your booking confirmation includes details on where you can retrieve your booking details. If you do not have your booking confirmation email, see this FAQ.

Click through to the property page and you should be provided with lots of photos to look at.

We partner with Booking.com to show accommodation availability around the world. If your hotel / apartment / vacation rental isn't already listed on Booking.com you can do so here. If it is already listed, then you should see your accommodation in Travellerspoint searches as well.

Before a photo can be added to a blog entry, you must first upload it into your photo gallery. Photos can be added to the photo gallery through the Control Panel at the top of each page. Just click Upload Photos in the dropdown that appears when hovering over the text. Once a photo is in your gallery, you can add it to a blog by clicking on the picture icon when you are writing your entry.

Alternatively, you can insert photos from Flickr or elsewhere on the web by clicking on the 'From elsewhere online' tab, or you can upload a photo directly in the pop up by clicking on the 'Upload a photo' tab.

Yes, you can. This option is available to Supporting Members. If you are a Supporting Member you will see this option in your blog's settings page. To make your blog private and only visible to those with the password, click on the Settings link, and change Password protect your blog to Yes. You will now be presented with an input field to add a Password of at least 6 characters. Once you have added this, click Update Settings to make your blog private. From then on, all visitors will be presented with a login window when trying to view your blog.

This is a manual process whereby blog entries are featured by volunteer moderators based on the quality of the writing, interest of the post or photography included.

Yes. You can either select one of our pre-designed, professional looking templates, or you can choose to customize your blog completely in your own look and feel by updating the style sheet through your blog control panel. Although not hard to do, if you don't know what CSS is, we recommend you read up on it first before attempting this. You can always switch back to one of the templates if your attempts at designing your own blog template are not successful - no entries will be lost in this process!

Tags are used to categorize your blog entries, and you can add multiple tags to each blog entry. This is a great way to group entries as over time you will be able to view blog entries by tag, for example all your entries tagged as Sydney, or tagged Backpacking. You can assign any tag you want to a blog entry, for example the city name, or the type or name of the trip you are on. You can choose to display all the tags in the navigation part of your site by setting Show tags in navigation to Yes.

Yes. However, this option is only available for Supporting Members. If you have joined as a Supporting Member, go to the 'Settings' area of your travel blog and set allowing blogentries by email to 'Yes'. An email address will appear that you can use to update your blog with, either via standard email or by mobile phone (MMS or email). Pictures in jpg format can also be sent along and will automatically appear in your blog post. More information on this process can be found here.

From your blogs control panel, click on the 'Settings' link of the blog you are trying to change. At the top of the Settings page you are able to change the title, subtitle and subdomain of your blog, amongst other optional settings.

Please contact us with your username and the domainname (ie. the bold bit in this link 'https://domainname.travellerspoint.com') of the blog you deleted. We will then re-activate it for you.

In the blog editing window, click on Map icon . In the pop up window that appears, select the trip that you would like to include the map for, and hit the Insert button or the Select Map View button. If you choose the latter, a map will appear in the pop up window that you can zoom in and out on, as well as pan from left to right until you have found the exact view you wish to insert into your blog entry. Click on Insert to include the map in that state in your blog entry. To learn more about inserting a map in a zoomed in state, read this detailed How To Insert a Zoomed In Map in Your Blog guide. To learn more about our travel mapping feature, visit this page.

We recommend uploading directly to either Youtube or Vimeo. Then you can embed your video from those providers. You can also link up your account on Vimeo/Youtube with Travellerspoint.

You can insert a video into your blog entry in the same way that you would insert a photo or map. When writing the blog entry, select the Video icon and select either one of your own uploaded videos, or stream a video from selected other video providers.

When you generate a PDF, a file will be created in PDF format and downloaded to your computer. You can view and print this file using a PDF reader which are freely available online.

When you generate in HTML format, the results will appear within your browser and you can print directly from your browser.

There are some advantages and disadvantages to both options. The main disadvantage of generating a PDF is that your maps and videos will not show within the entries. The HTML version will show maps and videos as normal and when printing from HTML these will be included in your printout. The main disadvantage of using the HTML version is that the layout can be somewhat different from browser to browser and this might cause a strange looking printout.

Besides the 'Blog Owner' there are three types of author that a blog can have. Depending on the type of author, their privileges will differ.

1. Writer - A writer can write new entries and edit their own entries as well as see how many comments or subscribers a blog has, but cannot edit the comments or see the subscribers details.
2. Editor - Like writer, but an editor can also edit all entries, whether written themselves or by others. Editors can also view the comments and edit or delete them but can not see subscribers details aside from the total number of subscribers.
3. Publisher - Nearly exactly the same privileges as the blog owner, except that a publisher can not delete the entire blog in one go.

On your My Blogs page, click on the Manage link for the blog that you wish to add more authors for. Select the Authors sub-tab (under the MANAGE tab) and click the 'Add a new Author' link.

Enter the username of the new author, which role they will have (each gives different privileges) and if you wish to allow them to post entries via email and click the "Add Author" button.

The user you have added will now be able to locate this blog on his My Blogs page.

Yes and No.

It is possible for photos and videos, if you have some basic details for them, but it is not possible with the maps. The photos and videos will however not show in the pop up windows you see when you click on either the Picture or Video icons when you are typing an entry as you did not upload these.

To add another users photo (or any photo on any other site), find the location of that photo and include in place of the XXX as follows: [img=XXX]. XXX will be a link like https://www.travellerspoint.com/photos/116989/Petersfield_Lake.jpg

To add another users video, find the unique id of that video and include it in place of the XXX: [video provider=fliqz videoid=XXX]. XXX will be a number although this is currently nearly impossible to locate so you would need to have it provided by whoever uploaded the video. Note that this is only the case for videos uploaded through Travellerspoint; you can add videos uploaded by anyone through Youtube, iFilm, Fliqz and Travelistic.

This means that we currently do not have all the navigational elements of the blogging system translated in your preferred language. Note; you can still blog in whatever language you choose! Unfortunately the parts of your blog that are part of the automatic settings (words like "search", "subscribe" etc.) will not be translated. If this is important to you, then please read this FAQ on how to add your language to the list.

Please contact us using the "Other questions and comments" option as your topic. Include the language that you wish to translate the blog system for and a current email address and we will get in touch with you quickly with a short page of terms that need to be translated. Upon receiving the translation we will do some small checks and upload it so that it is available to all users. Unfortunately we currently cannot pay for this translation, but we can increase your photo limits if you like.

This includes a selection of links at the bottom of each blog post that allow your readers to submit that entry to popular social networking sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon. This can help in getting more readers for your blog.

This allows you to display full XML feeds instead of just the snippets that show by default. This will also include photos and videos in your blog entries and is particularly useful if you want to automatically publish your blog to for example Facebook so that your friends can read your entries directly in your profile.

Yes, in your blog management area, go to the SETTINGS tab. Where it says "Show complete XML feeds", set the dropdown list to Yes and save these new settings. The next time your XML feed is updated, it will include the complete entries, including photos, maps and videos in your feed.

Yes, we offer all bloggers the option to include Google Analytics on their blog. Google Analytics provides really detailed stats tracking visitors, most popular pages, referrals and much more. Best of all, it's FREE - both to sign up with Google Analytics and to add this option to your Travellerspoint blog!

This allows you the option to add a much more comprehensive stats and tracking system to your blog than the default offered by Travellerspoint (which tracks page views and visitors but not referrals for example). You will have to sign up for a Google Analytics account (which is free) to get a tracking number to enter in this input box. More details on how to get a Google Analytics account and where to find the tracking number are included in this blog post.

This is up to you. If you like, you can allow public commenting and specify the number of days that commenting should be on for a new post. Otherwise, only Travellerspoint members will be able to comment. To allow public commenting go to your blog settings page and set the "Anyone can comment" option to Yes.

If you have enabled commenting by the general public, you will be given an extra option to set how long this is possible for. By changing the number of days anyone that is not a member of Travellerspoint can comment, you effectively remove the possibility for non Travellerspoint members to comment that amount of days after a blog post has been published.

The reason we recommend keeping public commenting open so short is that it cuts down drastically on the number of spam comments made by both bots and humans. Naturally you can change this length at any time, so feel free to set this to whatever length of time works for you!

Akismet is a collaborative effort to make comment spam something you don't have to worry about. Their system analyzes millions of comments posted every day around the web and using all that information they have created a fantastic resource that helps detect what is and isn't spam. Because they are such nice people, they allow you to access that system for free, assuming your blog is a personal one and not commercial (which of course none on TP are!).

You will need to apply for an API key here, and once you receive it via email, just enter it in the right spot under your Travellerspoint blog's settings page, and you are ready to go. Akismet will then check all comments made by the public to your blog and help filter out spam.

Please consider donating to Akismet if you use their system.

In the blog editing window, click on Map icon . In the pop up window that appears, select the trip that you would like to include the map for, and hit the Insert button or the Select Map View button. If you choose the latter, a map will appear in the pop up window that you can zoom in and out on, as well as pan from left to right until you have found the exact view you wish to insert into your blog entry. Click on Insert to include the map in that state in your blog entry. To learn more about inserting a map in a zoomed in state, read this detailed How To Insert a Zoomed In Map in Your Blog guide.

If you want to let people know about your blog, the best is to send them all an email with your blog's direct url. The url will be something like this: https://your-domain.travellerspoint.com . You can also link your blog to Facebook which will ensure all your new entries show up for your friends.

Yes, you can become a Supporting Member and we will remove the ads from your blog. You'll also get a nice little badge on your profile and you won't see any more ads on Travellerspoint when you're logged in.

You can create a lovely printed copy of your blog using the service provided by Into Real Pages.

Travellerspoint blogs are one of the supported platforms on their service.

Use the forum search function to search for postings by username. Alternatively, your most recent forum posts will show on your profile page or in the 'Forum Template' index page.

Something that you posted was in violation to the Travellerspoint forum rules. Please read the forum rules before posting to ensure this does not happen again.

Travellerspoint members chip in to help keep the forums clean of spam and advertising. Members that have reached a certain 'rank' can flag forum posts as spam to alert the moderators and administrators of each forum. The moderators and administrators then assess each post and edit/remove accordingly.

A moderator or site administrator has edited your entry and included a comment about why they have done this. See the forum rules for possible reasons.

Travellerspoint bases its ranking of members on their contribution to the site through forum posts, blog entries, referrals and photos (among others). Featured entries, albeit forums, photos or blogs, help boost rankings further. The more active you are as a member, the higher the ranking.

There can be many reasons, including that the question is so specific that no one reading it has the answer. To help increase your chances of a reply, we have put together some tips on How to get the most out of your Forum Posts.

You can change your details on the site at any time by logging in and clicking on the 'Control Panel' link on the left hand side of the page. There are numerous details you can update in the Control panel, including your username, email address and password.

To ensure a maximum of privacy without compromising the site's functionality, some of your details are visible while others aren't. Your email address is not revealed publicly on the site. When other members send you messages, you are notified via email, but the email address is not shown to them. Your date of birth is also never revealed, although your age is.

Do note that if you subscribe to blog, your email address is shown to the person whose blog it is.

Most of travel advice that you post on Travellerspoint (apart from private messages) is publicly viewable and you should assume that it may be indexed by search engines. If you don't want to be linked to this information you could use an alias for your name. You also have the option of keeping your blog private by specifying a password restricting access to those people who know the password.

To disable email notification of new messages you receive from other members, open your message center when logged in. If you are currently being notified, you will see a link at the top of the page saying 'Don't notify me'. Once you have clicked that link you won't be notified any more and the link will change to 'Notify me', if you decide you want to be notified again.

Some users have reported problems logging in. While the reasons could range from a mistyped password to a code error, here are some other options that you can try.

• your username and password are case-sensitive so make sure you do not have caps lock on
• enable cookies. More information on enabling cookes can be found here
• make sure the clock on your computer is set correctly (if the time/date is wrong your login cookie may not be saved properly)
• adjust your browser's security settings in your browser's preferences area. If your settings are set too high, you will not be able to log in to our site. You will have to set the settings to medium high or lower to be able to log in
• add an "s" behind http to visit the secure version of Travellerspoint and try logging in from there

You can inactivate your account by clicking on the 'Inactivate my account' link on your profile editing page. This will delete all information you have uploaded or posted, excepting wiki travel guide content and forum posts as these are essential to the flow of the conversation on those pages. All personally identifiable information will be removed.

We have fairly strict rules about website promotions on the site. For example, promotional posts in the forum can be deleted without warning. To promote your site, you can add your website to your profile. Once you have posted regularly enough in the forums or had a photo featured, your link will show up. Alternatively, you could consider becoming a Travellerspoint sponsor or, if you have non-commercial site, we may be interested in a link swap.

Travellerspoint bases its ranking of members on their contribution to the site through forum posts, weblog entries and photos which have been featured through the site. The more active you are as a member, the higher the ranking.

You can use the search function on Travellerspoint to search for your own name and retrieve your username. The search box is located on the left hand side of every Travellerspoint page.

To change your profile, you need to go to your Control Panel. Once there, Profile is the first option.

Yes. All you have to do is go to your Message Center and click Notify Me (at the top of the screen).

There is no setting to stop your Travellerspoint profile from being crawled by search engines like Google. The only way to stop your name from showing up is by changing your profile details so you're not using your real name. Go to your Control Panel and click on My Profile to change those details.

You can reset your password to a new temporary one by filling in some details on this page. If this doesn't work, contact us.

Someone has flagged one of your messages as SPAM. It is currently being reviewed by one of the Administrators of the site and if it isn't SPAM your messaging account will be opened up again shortly.

Send your friends the direct links to your photo gallery, profile, diary or blog via email. The best link is direct to your profile and looks like this https://www.travellerspoint.com/users//

Let your friends and family know about the site! We'll even help you keep an eye on how many members you have referred in the Referral section of your Control Panel and use those referrals to increase your member ranking. If you have a website, feel free to link through to Travellerspoint.

Check out our Advertising on Travellerspoint page and follow the instructions there. This is for TRAVEL sites only and we're sorry to say that we are not able to respond to queries regarding advertising that can't follow the simple guidelines outlined on our Advertising page.

Edit it. Everything in the travel guide is fully editable, so you can just log in and add your contribution. The only exception is on articles which have been locked or featured, which only certain members can edit.

This member has not yet uploaded a photo of themselves and tagged it as 'me'. They might not have gotten around to this, or they might prefer not to have a profile pic available. If you'd like to add a profile pic to your own profile, then follow these simple instructions.

If you love using Travellerspoint and would like to show this with a donation, you can do that in a couple of ways. The first is to become a Supporting Member. This will also remove ads from Travellerspoint when you are logged in. If you would like to donate more, then you can also use this Paypal link to make a one-off donation. All donations are appreciated!

Cancelling your supporting membership can be done at any time from this page. And thank you for your time as a supporter.

In the blog editing window, click on Map icon . In the pop up window that appears, select the trip that you would like to include the map for, and hit the Select Map View button. A map will appear in the pop up window that you can zoom in and out on, as well as pan from left to right until you have found the exact view you wish to insert into your blog entry. Click on Insert to include the map in that state in your blog entry. To learn more about inserting a map in a zoomed in state, read this detailed How To Insert a Zoomed In Map in Your Blog guide.

Click on the user icon on the top right of most pages of the site to reveal the links to your various pages of content. Click on Your Travel Map to view all your trips. Click on any trip in that list to update it, or click on the + icon to add new trips.

You can view members' maps through their profile pages. In the right column of the profile page is a section with a list of each member's trips, where you can view maps of each individual trip or, alternatively, a map of all their trips.

When editing your photos you can select the location for each photo. At the moment that is the only way of updating the locations.

Go to your Control Panel and select "Update Your Trips". Once you have reached your map management page, select "Map my entries". To add an entry to your map, you need to edit the entry and specify the period of travel to which the blog refers (eg. Describes Travel from 2018-07-03 until 2018-07-15). Hit "Publish". This will add the blog entry to the corresponding leg of your trip.

In the blog editing window, click on "Map". Select the trip whose map you would like to include.

As much as possible, we have aimed to be as accurate as possible with our coordinates, but there may be locations, cities and countries out there that we got wrong (or weren't able to find accurate coordinates for). If you find one like that, contact us, stating the exact location/city/country name. It is also possible to manually select the location on the map, by dragging the icon to the right location after adding a stop. You can also customise the name of the stop if you want to change how people see it (or use a different language).

We use a combination of our own places and data from Rome2rio to retrieve locations as you type. The list is quite comprehensive. If you find a place name is missing, you can still add it. Read How to add custom locations to your trips
for a detailed explanation on how to add a custom location

In the map editing view, click on the stop. Then click on the menu icon for that stop and you should see an option to "Delete Stop"

In the map editing view, while viewing your trip, click on the menu icon. Then click on "Add stops".

In your profile page, select "All trips by (insert your name)". Alternatively, you can select "All trips & photos" in the drop-down menu above your map.

On your Travel Map page, click on the trip that contains the stop you wish to edit. Click on the stop you want to change to edit things like name/custom labels/dates/transport mode and notes. To edit the order of the stops, select which stop it should come after when editing it.

On your Travel Map page, click on the trip that you wish to edit. To change the details for the trip (line colour/trip name/trip description), click on the menu icon, then click on Edit Trip Details. This will also allow you to change the color of the trip.

Yes, you can.

If the other FAQ answers aren't enough guidance, please refer to this detailed guide showing how to map your travels. It includes screenshots showing the various steps.

If you are a supporting member you have the option to create your own custom routes which can be as detailed as you like. For full details on how to go about it, you can read this article on creating custom trip routes

All members can upload their travel photos to their own photo gallery. We then manually decide which pictures are of a high enough standard to be featured in the featured photography gallery, which is used to randomly display pictures on various pages throughout the site. Be sure to tick the "Allow Featuring" checkbox and include Location information when uploading, otherwise we won't be able to include your photo in the public galleries.

Nothing. If you aren't happy with your photos being featured on our site, don't tick the checkbox allowing them to be featured. If you submit your photos you retain full copyright over them and can of course delete them whenever you like.

You can upload an unlimited number of photos on Travellerspoint. We resize the photos you upload to be displayed at a suitable size for the web.

Tags are categories which you assign to the photo you are uploading. You can give a photo multiple tags. So, if you are uploading a photo which shows you in front of the Taj Mahal, you could tag it as 'buildings' and 'Taj_Mahal'. This means that your photo will be grouped with other photos tagged as 'buildings' or 'Taj_Mahal'.

Simply upload a photo (or any other png,gif or jpg) and tag it as 'me'. This will automatically include it in your member profile for others to see. You can add as many photos tagged as 'me' as you like and a random one will be selected every time the page is refreshed.

So go on, show the rest of the members who you are!

No, not without getting the explicit permission from the person that took the photo and holds the copyright to that photo. You can use the message center to contact the member with such a request.

Travellerspoint does not have any copyright over images uploaded by members and can not grant such permission.

Yes. The photo uploader on the site should work with any modern mobile phone or tablet.

Users can use the Report button to notify moderators that a comment should be inspected. Typical reasons to report comments would be that they contain nothing but advertising or spam, inflammatory or derogatory content. Please note that the owner of the photo which received the comment can also remove and hide comments, so if the comment was added some time ago and you are unsure whether to report it, the owner of the photo has probably already ok'd it.

The photography moderators are notified that a comment has been reported as inappropriate content and will make a decision on it. They will either delete it or mark it ok for public view.

Yes, if several of your comments have been flagged as inappropriate, commenting will temporarily be disabled for your account until moderators have made a decision on the comments. If they are considered fine, the ability to comment will be restored to your account. If not, your account will either be closed permanently or the ability to comment will be removed permanently.

Assuming it is not your internet connection, the most likely cause of a very slow upload is the size of the photo you are trying to upload (typically more than 1MB).

If you are using our bulk uploader, you can speed up uploads dramatically by unticking the checkbox 'Save a Backup on Travellerspoint'. This will not upload the original image, which will be much faster, although of course the original is then not backed up on Travellerspoint.

If you are using the single photo upload, you will need to resize your photo to a smaller size to speed up the uploading process.

There's no real need to resize your photos before uploading as we handle that through the uploader already. However, if you want to resize your images anyway, you can you can use free programs like Irfanview which you can download. There is also paid software that allows you to resize photos, like Photoshop.

There should be no need to resize before uploading. The upload process takes care of this automatically.

On Travellerspoint, you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Deleting photos makes no difference.

You can choose to contact the Travel Helpers for the overall region or country you are travelling to as well. These Travel Helpers are usually happy to help answer questions about any location within that country or region. It is also a good idea to post your question in the forum, so that anyone browsing the site can answer, not just those that have taken the time to become Travel Helpers.

The Travel Helpers are all volunteers and other members of the site, similar to yourself. Some Helpers may respond within a few hours, while others may take a week or two. If a Travel Helper doesn't respond to your question within a fortnight, please contact us and we'll contact them to make sure they still want to be a Travel Helper.

You can contact multiple Travel Helpers at once by posting your question in the forum. If you specify a city/country or region when posting your topic, this will send an email to all the Travel Helpers for that location letting them know someone needs help.

Travel Helpers are Travellerspoint members dedicated to helping others plan their trip by voluntarily offering information you would have a hard time finding in a guide book.

You will have to unsubscribe as a Travel Helper. To do so, you need to go to your Control Panel and select the Travel Helpers option. Tick the boxes for the countries you would like to unsubscribe to and hit the delete button.