Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Metrotwin?

Metrotwin is an online community website that 'twins' London and New York and provides recommendations of the best places in both cities. It’s a social utility rather than a social networking site: we want it to be useful for the time-starved, novelty-seeking metropolitans living in or travelling between New York and London.

2. Why have British Airways launched the site?

We fly hundreds of thousands of people between New York and London every year and we’ve been flying this route since 1946. So, there’s been a British Airways community of customers, crews and employees around New York and London for a long time.

We wanted to create a genuinely useful service that unlocks this community’s vast store of expertise and makes it easy for all these groups to share their collective knowledge. A community website providing crowd-sourced recommendations seems a very natural thing for us to create.

3. Who is it for?

The site is available for everyone to use. Anyone can access the recommendations, create a profile and post their own reviews and ratings. We hope it will be useful for everyone who travels between or lives in either city.

4. How does it work?

Metrotwin recommends only the best places - it’s not a user generated directory service. We think it’s more useful, for example, to provide people with a quick way to find the ten best places to drink coffee than to provide hundreds of reviews for every single coffee-shop in town. New York and London are particularly busy cities and there are millions of web pages about each – more information than anyone really has time to sift through. Finding the most up-to-date information about the best of New York and London is particularly time-consuming and frustrating because things move so fast in these cities. Metrotwin provides searchable lists of very short recommendations provided by local experts, bloggers and online communities based in New York and London. Each recommendation appears with a Google Map and provides basic contact and travel information. And every single place is ranked by a buzz index (aka The Metrotwin Index) that is updated in real-time as a result of the community’s collective behaviour on the site. Metrotwin also provides personalised recommendations based on the similarities and differences between its users’ profiles. The more you use the site, the better these recommendations become.

5. Is it free to use?

Yes, it’s totally free for everyone to use. All of the site’s content can be accessed without registering. Additional features like personalised recommendations, the ability to post your own reviews and make and save lists require registration but this is also free and open to anyone.

6. Do I need a profile?

You don’t need a profile to access any of the site’s content. But there are a number of benefits to creating one. For example, you will need one if you’d like to start saving recommendations to create your own lists and maps, or if you would like to write your own reviews of places, or rate places, that have been recommended on the site.

1. What are ‘Recommendations’ and who writes them?

‘Recommendations’ are very short (500 characters max) reviews with a one-line summary, a photographic image, basic contact and travel details and some descriptive keywords, or tags.

‘Recommendations’ are written by local experts, bloggers, brands and online communities who are based in each city. British Airways has a contract with each of these contributors and rewards some of them with BA Miles. Contributors are not allowed to promote themselves or their own services within recommendations.

What are ‘Reviews’ and who writes them?

‘Reviews’ are short comments posted by users about the ‘recommendations’ published by Metrotwin’s network of experts. Anyone can write a review as long as they are registered to the site.

How do I ‘Rate’ places?

When you write a review you will be prompted to select a rating by clicking on one of the five stars next to the text box. When you click the ‘Add this review’ button your rating is saved to the site. Anyone can rate places as long as they are registered to the site. Obviously, you can only rate somewhere that has been published as a ‘recommendation’.

Can I still rate somewhere without being logged in or having created a profile?

The site does allow you to show your support with the ‘I love this place’ link. You’ll find it in each ‘Recommendation’ summary on ‘Lists’ pages as well as on the ‘Recommendation’ page itself. You don’t have to be logged in to use this feature.

What if I can’t find the place I’d like to review or rate?

Probably because a recommendation for it hasn’t been published yet. You’ll find a ‘Suggest a place’ form on every list page, including search results, that allows you to send your suggestions to the site Editor. We can’t promise that we’ll immediately run out and create a recommendation, but your suggestions will help us decide where we should be thinking of going next.

What if I disagree with a ‘Recommendation’ or ‘Review’?

Firstly, you can put your own point of view across by publishing your own review and rating. You can also write to us here at editor@metrotwin.com. Or, if you feel that the ‘Recommendation’ or ‘Rating’ is untrue, offensive or inappropriate in any way then you can click the ‘Report this recommendation’ or ‘Report this review’ link next the content in question. When you do this you will be asked to provide some additional information within a simple form that will be mailed to us. The processes that we have in place for dealing with reports, and the issue of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable use of our site is covered in more detail within Terms and Conditions and Acceptable Use Policy.

What are ‘Lists’?

Metrotwin organises ‘Recommendations’ into thematic ‘Lists’ – for example, ‘Posh Teatime’ and ‘Little Japan’. Most often a ‘List’ will contain recommendations from both cities, and there are controls associated with each list that let you view each list as ‘both cities’ or just ‘New York’ or ‘London’. ‘Lists’ are displayed in descending order of Metrotwin Index value – i.e. the places with a higher Index value appear at the top of the list. The ordering of a ‘List’ is therefore dynamic and will change as a place moves up or down in terms of its Metrotwin Index value. ‘Lists’ are displayed with ten items (‘Recommendations’) per page, and there are paging controls that allow you to navigate to further pages of the list provided at the bottom of each ‘List’ page.

Are there different types of ‘List’?

Yes, there are four main types of ‘List’:

• Feature Lists – These are editorially created and displayed in the ‘Lists’ page carousel. A maximum of 46 lists are displayed within the four pages of the carousel – a mixture of the most recent and hottest.
• Category Lists – There are nine categories of recommendations on the site. These are accessed via the ‘Category’ drop down menu within the global navigation. Selecting any of these options will display a category list – for example, selecting ‘Pubs, Clubs and Bars’ will display a list of all the ‘Pubs, Clubs and Bars’ in the Metrotwin database. Many places fall into two or more categories, and these would therefore appear in multiple Category Lists. The categories relating to an individual recommendation are displayed underneath the images on a recommendation page as white text out of a solid blue background. They are links, and clicking them will create a ‘List’ of all the places in that category.
• Keyword/Tag Lists – As well as the site’s categories, we also encourage contributors to add descriptive keywords/tags when they publish Recommendations. This makes it easy to generate a ‘List’ for any keyword. Keywords/Tags are displayed underneath the images on a recommendation page as white text out of a solid grey background. They are links, and clicking them will create a ‘List’ of all the places matching that particular keyword/tag.
• Search Results – Search Results are also displayed as ‘Lists’, with ten results to a page, in descending order of Metrotwin Index value.

How do I find a ‘List’ that I am interested in?

At this stage, only Editors, Partners and Contributing Editors can create public ‘Lists’. We may extend this functionality to all users in the future.

What if I can’t find a ‘List’ that I’m interested in?

By browsing the ‘Lists’ page carousel. It displays 46 of the latest and hottest lists on four pages, but you will also find a ‘View all lists’ link that opens a new page displaying smaller thumbnails of all lists and paging controls at the bottom of the page to support browsing.

Can I suggest a ‘List’?

Yes please. At the bottom of each page of the ‘Lists’ carousel there is a form that you can use to send your suggestions to us. We can’t promise to create every list you suggest but your suggestions will certainly help us decide which lists we should be creating next.

Can I create personal ‘Lists’?

Yes, whenever you ‘Review’ a place on Metrotwin it is automatically added to a list of your places displayed on your profile page. You can also create lists of places you’ve been to and places you’d like to go to by saving individual recommendations using the links at the top of the recommendation pages (‘I’ve been here’ and ‘Save this to my profile’). All three of these lists are displayed on your profile and visible to others. You can also view each of these lists as a map.

What is ‘Twinning’?

Metrotwin sets out to twin New York with London, neighbourhood-by-neighborhood, street-by-street, shop-by-shop and landmark-by-landmark. The idea comes from an overheard conversation between two tourists – one of them asked, “So, what’s the Williamsburg of London then?” It’s a conversation we’ve all heard at some stage and a very natural way for people to understand a new city. It works with New York and London because they are, arguably, closer in many ways than almost any other two cities in the world. Twinned city-states on either side of a river called The Atlantic, divided by a common language and all that. We think twinning is entertaining and useful in equal measure, and we know first-hand about its power to drive debate.

How does it work?

Every Recommendation in the site can be twinned with a place in ‘the other city’. The twin is displayed at the top right of a Recommendation page, with a link to the other place. If you don’t agree with the Twin that’s displayed, you can suggest your own by clicking the associated link and sending the form off.

Are there plans to extend ‘Twinning’ in future?

We’ve got a whole bunch of Twinning features planned for future releases. We’ll be sharing these with you on the Metrotwin blog and we’ll be really interested to see what real people think we should do next with Twinning.

What is the Metrotwin Index and how does it work?

The Metrotwin Index is a score out of one hundred given to every place in our database. It’s an index of buzz calculated in near real-time as a result of the community’s collective behaviour on the site. So, for example, if lots of people save, fave, rate and review a place then its score will go up, and if no-one’s looks at it at all it ticks down over time.

Every new place is published to the site with a score of 50, and the algorithm that calculates the Metrotwin Index starts working immediately.