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.

The royal family joins Flickr

by Sean McLachlan on

It seems like everybody is getting on Flickr these days. Now even the Royal Family of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms is sharing their photographs. The collection of photos, both old and new, will go live on Monday. There’s also a spot where the common rabble can share their photos of the royals.

The collection will feature not only pictures of the Royal Family, but also pictures taken by the Royal Family, which promises to give insights into the bluebloods that you don’t get from the Buckingham Palace tour. Prince Charles is an avid watercolor painter and honorary member of the Royal Watercolour Society, so perhaps he’s dabbled in photography too.

The older photos should be of interest. We tend to think of Queen Elizabeth as a rather proper elderly lady who wears funny hats, but historical images reveal the many phases of her life. This one, courtesy the UK Government, shows her in 1945 when she was still a princess. She’s learning how to change a tire as part of her Auxiliary Territorial Service training during World War Two.

After you’re done admiring the royals, take a look at some of the many talented photographers who contribute to Gadling’s Flickr page.

Get tips on visiting Disney with a special needs child at Mouse-Aid

by Katie Hammel on

Disneyland and Disney World are supposed to be the happiest places on Earth. Every child wants to go to this place of wonder and excitement, and special needs children are no exception. But for parents of these children, the thought of organizing a trip may seem like a far too difficult task. That’s where the Mouse-Aid website comes in.

The website is not affiliated with Disney, but it is designed to help parents of children with special needs negotiate the obstacles to taking their kids on a Disney vacation. There are tips for travel, packing, get around the parks, dining and choosing a room, and what issues parents of special needs kids should consider The special needs covered range from physical and mental disabilities to ADHD and terminal illness.

For many parents, the most helpful part of the site might be the forums. Here parents can discuss the issues important for their children, like which rides might scare kids frightened of the dark. They can also find support in parents dealing with similar issues as themselves. As the aunt of a special needs child, I’ve seen how just knowing that there are other parents who understand your situation can be a big help in and of itself. If you are the parent of a child with special needs, and you are planning a trip to a Disney theme park, it might be worth checking out the Mouse-Aid site.

The ancient world on the web

by Sean McLachlan on

Archaeology buffs and staycationers have a new way to explore the world’s ancient civilizations and monuments.

The Heritage Key site offers an amazing 3D tour of King Tut’s treasure, plus piles of photos of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the rest of the ancient world’s greatest hits. There are also blogs and articles by regular bloggers and leading experts. Videos of excavations and interviews with archaeologists will keep you informed of the latest things happening in the past. There are some big names on here like Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and English historian John Julius Norwich.

There’s even a function where you can make your own avatar to explore online exhibitions. I’ve never seen the point of avatars, and I don’t see the point here, but the graphics are cool and people who are into that sort of thing will probably love it.

The site, which was launched last month, is free at the moment, but there are plans to make both free and premium sites once it gets off the ground. The system is pretty seamless and there’s already lots of content, so it looks like this site is going places.

Of course no website, no matter how snappy, can compete with seeing the real thing. I remember the first time I saw the Great Pyramid at Giza. I didn’t know it was so close to the edge of Cairo and as we headed into the suburbs on a minibus I wondered if I could see the pyramids yet. I looked out the window and saw nothing but this brown haze.

“Wow,” I thought. “I wonder if that’s a sandstorm.”

A second later I realized that it wasn’t sand, but the side of the pyramid. It was taking up my entire field of view! I craned my neck out the window and peered up to see the pyramid’s apex framed against a clear blue Saharan sky. That was twenty years ago and I still remember it like it happened this morning.

Try getting that from a website.

Four resources for horse-crazy travelers

by Katie Hammel on

I grew up riding horses, and though now that I live in a big city I don’t get to ride as often as I’d like, I still love the feeling of galloping on horseback to the rhythm of hoof beats. I’ve ridding with the gauchos in Argentina, through coffee fields in Honduras, over rolling green hills in Hawaii, and on the five-gaited four-legged teddy bear of an equine that is the Icelandic Horse. If you love horses and are looking to plan an equestrian vacation, here are four resources to get you started.

Equitours, “America’s largest and oldest horseback riding vacation company”, offers packaged tours for avid equestrians. With tours in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, America, and the South Pacific, they pretty much cover the globe by horseback. The site allows you to search by experience level, location, length of tour, and date. Trips range in cost from $800 to $2900 and include riding, accommodations, meals and transfers, but not flights.

Hidden Trails Equestrian Tours offers packaged vacations, but goes beyond the standard trail rides. In addition to vacation treks, they offer cattle and wild horse drives, riding clinics, covered wagon treks, riding safaris and pack trips in over 40 countries. Specialty trips include ride and cook, ride and fish, woman only, and gaited horse trips. Rates range from $600 to $3000 and include riding, accommodations, meals and transfers, but not flights.Equitrekking works with local riding companies to offer equestrian vacations throughout North and South America and Europe, with few options in South Africa, India and Nepal. In addition to offering links to the individual companies and their tours (which range in price, riding ability required and length) the site also offers advice and information on equestrian travel, travel tips, and clips from episodes of the Equitrekking TV show.

Nancy D. Brown, a travel writer and the lodging editor at Uptake.com, details horseback vacations around the world on her new blog, Writing Horseback. Detailing everything from full-service ranches and resorts to equestrian vacations and companies offering trail rides, her site covers destinations from California and Oregon to Antigua, Norway, and Hawaii. It’s not a fully comprehensive list of everything that’s out there (the site is quite new) but if you are open to suggestions for a destination, want to plan a trip to a resort that caters to riders, and prefer first-hand reviews, this website is a great resource.