Wanderfly.com travel-planning site launches in beta

by Meg Nesterov on


A new travel-planning website and booking engine is launching this month in beta, and I was excited to give it a test run, having first heard about the site this spring at a EuroCheapo travel happy hour. Wanderfly.com is a “personalized recommendation engine” that takes your interests, budget, and even social network connections to give you inspiration and help you plan your next vacation. Flights and hotels are pulled from Expedia, with restaurant recommendations, activities, and sightseeing descriptions culled from Lonely Planet, FourSquare, NileGuide, and Yelp.

Let’s say you have a week to travel in early September for Labor Day. Budget is under $1,000 per person for flights and hotels, and you’re interested in culture, beaches, and food. Plug all those into the search engine and you’ll get a series of destinations to review, refine, share, and book. While the site still has a few bugs (budget busters would sneak through the filters, the help feature is not fully enabled), the interface is slick and user-friendly, the features are thoughtful, and the content is reliable.

What’s cool about the site:

  • Since I’m currently based in Turkey, I loved that your point of origin could be pretty much anywhere in the world so I could run searches from New York and Istanbul to get a wide variety of places convenient for different parts of the world.
  • A wide (1,200 and growing) network of destinations gave me some ideas I’d never considered or even heard of (Kalingrad, Russia; Azemmour, Morocco; Krabi, Thailand), as well as some more tried-and-true vacation spots(Sunny Isles Beach, Florida; Mykonos, Greece; Split, Croatia).
  • Weather and news tabs give you an idea of the current climate (could be too hot on that Egyptian beach) and happenings, though you might come up with nothing for more obscure destinations. I also love that many of the news feeds are through Twitter accounts like @visitbritain, giving up-to-the-minute quickie items.

What will be cool about the site:

  • Ability to share trip ideas and plans with friends via email or Facebook is great for planning a trip with multiple people or getting feedback on a destination. Currently, Facebook Connect will tell you who you know in a given place, but I’d probably remember if I had a friend in Lutsk, Ukraine.
  • Festivals and special events come up via Eventful, but on the beta site event dates will pop up well after your search range so don’t plan around that blues festival just yet. There are also plans to add destination reviews, currency converters, and travel tips.
  • After all the searching, sorting, and sharing, you can actually book through the site, though only if you have a US credit card. The booking interface is also easy to use and gives options for frequent flier numbers, seat and meal preferences, and room types.

All in all, Wanderfly is a nifty new tool for dreaming and planning your next trip. If they could find a way to integrate time-sensitive deals, local blogs, and multiple-destination trips, this could be the only travel site you need.

Veils and YouTube trigger Canadian security investigation over passenger identification

by Tom Johansmeyer on


Score one for social media: some guy popped a video of two fully veiled women boarding a plane on YouTube, and now the Canadian authorities are investigating. The video is said to show passengers hopping onto an Air Canada flight to London from Montreal on July 11, 2010. The beef isn’t so much the veils as ensuring “that airline personnel are verifying the identity of all of passengers before they board a flight,” according to the AFP.

In the video, shot by a British traveler, the women were not required to show their faces before boarding, which Canadian Minister of Transportation John Baird called “deeply disturbing” in a statement released Sunday. He added that it “poses a serious threat to the security of the air travelling public.”

Top five ways to use social media to look like you’re working on vacation

by Tom Johansmeyer on

We’ve put some distance between us and the September 2008 financial crisis, but unemployment – and tension the workplace – is still high. There’s plenty of anxiety over whether people appear to be working hard enough, because it’s safe to assume that the budgets being allocated or raises and bonuses are unlikely to be generous. So, in the quest to appear productive, employees need more tools. Thankfully, we have social media: use it wisely, and you can look wholly dedicated to your company and your job while you’re on vacation.

The trick, of course, is to look productive. Work through your vacation, and you give up an opportunity to relax … and risk annoying the friends or family traveling with you. I’ve written about tools you can use to look like you’re working even when you’re not, but the proliferation of social media options gives you new ways to snow your boss.1. Plan your lies
While you’re waiting at the gate or sitting on the plane, write out the tweets and Facebook status updates that make it look like you’re thinking about the office. Use brief mentions of activities that could look like work, such as “Taking quick look @ document before heading to pool”. Write enough so you have three or four a day (you don’t want to overdo it).

2. Schedule your tweets and status updates
Since you don’t want to give up vacation time to even the appearance of working, schedule your tweets and Facebook status updates. HootSuite’s my favorite, but there are other tools you can use, as well. I prefer HootSuite because I can hit Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from the same place and schedule updates for each. Twitter may say you’re “taking quick look @ contract” but you’ll really be sipping something delightful on the sand.

3. “Favorite” tweets for @replying or retweeting later
Unfortunately, this requires that you actually do something while you’re on vacation, but it’s not as hard as it sounds (as long as you use a smartphone). While you’re waiting in line or running off to the bathroom, use a Twitter application (I use UberTwitter) to scan your stream and see if there is anything work- or business-related that you can retweet. Do some immediately, but mark most of the interesting tweets as favorites. When you get back to your hotel room, schedule the retweets over time, so it looks like you’re continually thinking about work.

4. Check in (with the office, that is)
Again, you can’t schedule this sort of behavior, but you can still fake it. During your flurries of @ replying and retweeting, dash off a few direct messages to key people at the office (peers are better than bosses, because I will seem more like real work) just to see how things are going and if anybody needs some help. The only risk is that you could get dragged into a conversation (or worse) if someone really does need a hnd.

5. Hire a helper
Find an unemployed liberal arts grad who’s willing to tweet and post for you for a few days. Pay him or her with access to your garage while you’re out of town and a hot meal when you get back. Hire a psych or philosophy major, and you can probably get away with cold pizza.

Five ways to make bus travel bearable

by Tom Johansmeyer on

I’ve been spending a lot of time on buses lately – and not the kind that trace an east-west route across Manhattan. For the trips I’ve been taking, it’s been the best way to go, but rolling by bus is still far from exciting. From having to smoke outside with the homeless people in front of Port Authority to being stuck next to or in front of a loud cell phone talker, it’s hard to find a less appealing way to travel. Some bus lines are better than others, and I’ve been fairly impressed by the one I’m taking these days. Nonetheless, it’s still a drag.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make your bus ride much easier.

There are obvious tactics, from music to reading materials, but anyone who travels (or has merely waited in a long line somewhere) can figure them out. Instead of the basics, which you should be able to figure out on your own, let’s take a look at five tricks that only come from painful experience.1. Get in line (or on the bus) early
This may seem obvious, but the reasons come with some subtlety. You want to claim your space as soon as possible. Wait too long, and you could wind up having to set next to someone who is already on board. Step onto the bus early, and you’ll be putting someone else in that position. The odds of having your own seat for the ride increase profoundly.

2. Look undesirable
As people get on, especially when there are no empty pairs left, they have to make some tough choices on where to sit. Your goal is to make them pass you without even considering an invasion of your personal space. Eat some smelly food, wear torn or dirty clothing or cough and sneeze. This will help you win the opportunity to stretch out later.

3. Spread out
If there are multiple stops before your destination, more passengers may get on. This only happens when you’re headed toward the “big place,” though. When I leave New York, for example, I don’t worry about losing space to passengers who get on later – the net flow is outward. Yet, when I’m headed back home, it’s hard to rest easy until we’ve left the last stop before the city. To further discourage people from sitting next to me, which is harder than in (2) above, I tend to spread out a bit, pluck away at my laptop and generally make it look time-consuming and annoying to clear space for another passenger. Nobody wants to wait in the aisle, especially for someone who is not really interested in helping.

4. Enlist your friends
While you don’t want to be among the degenerates who talk on the phone during the entire bus trip, you will need to be entertained. Texts, communication via BlackBerry Messenger and even traditional email will amuse you without annoying those around you. Make sure you have a few people on board to help you out, case someone gets bored or busy … or just doesn’t care about your plight.

5. Engage the world
I think the number of tweets I send while riding the bus skyrockets relative to my already elevated volume. If you aren’t a Twitter addict already, become one if you’re going to be spending a lot of time on a bus. It’s quiet, and it will keep you busy. Follow the right people, and it will also keep you laughing. To start, may I suggest @Gadling?

[tweetphoto via @tjohansmeyer]

Hotels making a move on social media, with targeted help

by Tom Johansmeyer on

The hotel industry has plenty of faith in the social media world – and no reservations about using it to gain reservations. But, it’s struggling to take control of the medium. A survey by Wine and Hospitality Network indicates that most respondents (in the business) spend only two hours a week managing their Facebook fan pages – with 14.2 percent having no such page to manage. Forty-two percent don’t use Twitter, and 25 percent tweet for less than an hour a week (they should reach out to @Colonnade for tips).

But, it isn’t for lack of trying. The internet is littered with the corpses of abandoned social media marketing initiatives, inside the travel industry and out. Notes online marketing publication ClickZ:

“Before hoteliers even consider a social media initiative, they should be aware that social media is a very engaged, hands-on marketing format. The social networks are a graveyard of abandoned hotel profiles and fan pages by hoteliers who did not realize the complexity of social marketing,” said Margaret Mastrogiacomo, social media specialist with Hospitality eBusiness Strategies, a strategic services and design firm.

Several properties are getting in on the action, committing resources and genuinely seeking returns. New York’s Roger Smith Hotel has made a clear social media play, according to ClickZ, by adopting Revinate, a tool to facilitate active social media management specifically for the hospitality business. Kimpton has adopted this platform as well.

ClickZ continues:

The focus on hotels pays off for the Roger Smith’s Simpson, who used to spend hours using search and setting up news alerts on competitors. While Revinate doesn’t include some of the hot new social media startups he keeps an eye on, like Bizzy and Pegshot, he says it covers the major sites, especially TripAdvisor, the most important. The ability to compare his hotel’s buzz with competitors is also unique. “It’s one thing to do it manually for your own establishment, but for me to do that for surrounding hotels or for what other people we have an interest in are doing, that becomes more laborious.”

So, what does this mean for the average traveler? Your opportunities to engage with the hotels you’ll call home, if only temporarily, are set to increase. Think beyond deals (though they are important) to every other reason you’d contact and open dialogue with a hotel. The possibilities are immense, and hotels, a bit slow to move in social media, appear to be on the brink.