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.

New website helps visitors explore the waterfalls of the Olympic Peninsula

by Katie Hammel on

The heavily-forested Olympic Peninsula, a slice of land that juts out into the Pacific in the far northwest of Washington state, is home to 24 major waterfalls. In an effort to make it easier for visitors to find and explore the different falls, Grays Harbor Tourism, Jefferson County Tourism Coordinating Council, and Olympic Peninsula Visitor Bureau have joined forces to launch a new website, OlympicPeninsulaWaterfallTrail.com.

While the waterfalls and the hiking and biking paths that surround many of the them have been around for years, the website and its handy guide map are new.

The 24 falls and their surroundings vary widely. There are the beautiful Sol Duc Falls in Olympic National Park , the tiered falls of Gatton Creek near Lake Quinault, and the Wynoochee Falls that form a pristine swimming hole, among others. There are cascades that thunder and others that barely trickle. You can hike, bike or drive to most, while a few are only accessible by boat. Some gush all year-round and others ebb and flow with the seasons. Some are easy to get to and others should only be visited by the more physically fit.

The website helps classify these various falls and makes visiting them easy. It’ll show you pictures of each waterfall, explain how to get there, and warn you of any hazards you’ll face along the way.

Trip planning: from low note to high note, or vice versa?

by Alison Brick on

Here’s the scenario: you’re combining two events in one trip–one you’re dreading (e.g. staying with the family), the other you’re looking forward to (e.g. the beach). Which do you do first?

I would’ve gone with the ‘get the bad stuff over with’ logic and ended with the fun. But I would’ve been wrong.

A report in the July/August edition of Psychology Today shows that it’s best to put the good experience first. It says that events at the beginning and end are remembered more than the middle, but the memory of those at the end fades faster than those at the beginning. So the trip that you’ll remember as better in the long run is the one that starts on a high note and ends on a low note.

Now that’s the way to start a vacation.

Is swine flu changing your travel plans?

by Tom Johansmeyer on

TripAdvisor asked its visitors a simple question: are you changing your travel plans because of the swine flu scare? Plenty of people had answers: 2,857 people, to be exact. The vast majority (61 percent) won’t be deterred by the risk of swine flu, though there’s no indication of how many of these respondents are headed to high-risk areas. Twenty-four percent are making adjustments to upcoming excursions, and 15 percent didn’t have any travel plans to change.

How about you? Are you changing your travel plans? Or, are you ready to push forward?

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Tupalo: A Website to Find the Best Eats and More

by Jamie Rhein on

Let’s say you’re a fan of all things Asian, or all things Indian (indie) and you want to find the restaurants, shops and music in a particular city to satisfy your cravings. Check out Tupalo, a website brought to our attention by a gadling reader, Mike. The site aims to connect people with the places to go and things to do in the cities where they live, but it also helps travelers get the insider scoop on recommended places, courtesy of the folks in the know. The Asian and Indian links are merely examples of the offerings. You can also find the best places to get your laundry done, buy books or just hang out.

Most information about cities is in English, but when I went to the Vienna, Austria link, it would have been helpful to know German. The neat thing about this site is that it will keep growing based on reader recommendations and efforts. If you have a place you want to recommend, here’s a venue to do it. According to Mike, Australia will soon be added.