AP News : ENCToday

Sep 14, 1:54 PM EDT

Area travel guides keep it simple

By ANNE WALLACE ALLEN
For The Associated Press

It seems almost every travel guide offers a glimpse of California's famed Napa and Sonoma region, the wine country that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Now a new online company has entered the crowded travel market. Area, a Web-based guide downloadable to a laptop, iPhone, or smartphone, is aiming for the style-conscious traveler who wishes to avoid the tourist hordes.

Area, http://www.area-daily.com , launches its first guide, to Napa and Sonoma, this month. It plans to follow by the New Year with guides to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, with a plethora of big cities in the United States and Europe coming in 2010.

Area's founders say their guides are an antidote to old-style paper guidebooks and their online supplements. They pledge to update their information every three months, and promise stylish dining, exclusive shopping and boutique hotels for the discerning consumer.

"Think of it as having a well-connected friend who shows you all the secret spots and local favorites," the company says in its promotional materials.

That friend is a downloadable, digital brochure that makes great reading even if you have no intention of leaving your armchair. The Napa-Sonoma version, which runs 30 pages, is beautifully photographed and costs $9.99. It can be printed out, but for the paper-averse it also contains live links that let users book a hotel room or make dinner reservations from the comfort of their own PDAs.

Of course, there are many online guides to California's famed wine country. The popular Frommer's guide, at http://www.frommers.com/destinations/napavalley/0111010001.html , allows users to share its content on social networking sites and has links to hotel reservations and car rentals. Like Area, Frommer's has photos, maps, and a dash of history, though Frommer's also has a thicket of ads, some of them distractingly animated.

There's also the local site http://www.winecountry.com , which helps users buy wine and find art openings, wine tastings, and other events.

What really sets Area apart is the way it distills the hectically crowded offerings of this tourist mecca. With in-depth information on relatively few wineries, hotels, and restaurants, with a page on hard-to-find wines produced in limited quantities, Area "is about avoiding tourists," said Christine Magda, a spokeswoman for the site. Area also offers a "valet" trip-booking service to help users find personalized tours, promising hard-to-find experiences such as seating at Fashion Week in Paris or dove-shooting in Argentina.

And if you decide not to ski at Chamonix or pick truffles in Italy, vignettes from luxurious valet trips past, now posted on the site, make great reading. Other travel guides "give you touristy spots and not the places that necessarily are indicative of your stylish people who are in that particular city," said Magda. "It's about people who have a desire to look out for different, unique things that stand out, that aren't done everywhere else."