Eye surgeon Vivek Verma decided on Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok as his holiday destinations for Puja 2006 while surfing the blogs.

“Information put up on the Internet by the bloggers was quite useful in planning our vacation. We knew even before taking the flight the places to visit and stay at,” he said.

On his return, Verma, too, posted his experience on his blog and was thrilled to receive feedback.

Blogging has taken off among the city’s travel fraternity, with more and more people preferring the first-hand user experiences to conventional tourist guides while drawing up vacation plans.

Information about budget hotels, good food in a particular city, trekking paths, night halts at mountain forests — the blogs carry all that a tourist would be interested in.

“The biggest reason for the popularity of blogs in the tourism circuit is that users are posting recent information. Besides, blogs also carry feedback,” said Deep Kalra, founder and chief executive officer of the portal www.makemytrip.com, which has started a website for bloggers, www.oktatabyebye.com.

“Over the past year, blogging has become very popular in India. Our site is visited by around 500 people daily,” he added.

According to Kalra, the most relevant information that can be obtained from the blogs are those about eateries, hotels and places that are usually not mentioned in the travel guides. “There are a number of inns or houses in the Lake District of the UK. Bloggers who have visited the place can tell you which ones are really good,” he pointed out.

Travel agents and airlines, too, benefit from travel blogs. “We try to use information provided by bloggers to help people plan their trips,” said Anil Punjabi, chairman (east), Travel Agents Federation of India.

“There are a lot of interesting places that tourism officials tend to miss out on while guiding travellers. Bloggers’ information help fill in the gap,” Punjabi added.

As for the airlines, a British Airways official said: “We have an interactive site, where passengers send in their feedback. The inputs are monitored regularly.”

A spokesperson for Jet Airways said: “Some bloggers wrote that the breakfast served on our flights is good, but one more sandwich would make it better. It is interesting to get such feedback.”

Singapore Airlines, too, keeps a tab on the travel blogs to know about the preferences of passengers. More and more airlines are following suit.