Wanderfly, the travel planning site we like, has just signed up a few more media companies as curators.
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement wherein the likes of Mashable, Jaunted (“celeb-favorite destinations”), Havaianas (“beaches that soothe your sole”), and my favorite, the History Channel, control a piece of Wanderfly’s web real estate.
From there the subject matter experts can make travel suggestions and perhaps History Channel curators can inspire readers to learn what really happened at the Circus Maximus or the Baths of Caracalla.
With this announcement, it seemed like the right time to take a deeper tour of Wanderfly.
Wanderfly is a photographically intensive site—perhaps cinematic is not too strong a word—with the goal of getting you off the couch and experiencing other places. For my money, they succeed in stoking wanderlust and curing weltschmerz.
You set parameters that include your hotel and air allowance, dates of travel, the experiences you crave, a location (either a general region or a specific city), and Wanderfly lands you on one of their beautiful pages with a hotel suggestion and a flight cost within your budget, along with lots of suggestions.
In its current forms, Wanderfly is an aggregrator and indexer of its content sources. They’ve tapped into many newer social media players (Yelp and Foursquare), along with reliable and slightly dusty travel pros, including Frommer’s.
But to get more detailed content, you’re forced to jump to one of their partner sites.
Edinburgh: the poetic city, courtesy of Wanderfly.
For instance, on my visit to the Edinburgh page, after having specified landmarks, outdoors activities, and food, I was presented with iconic pics of the famous Castle and the city’s medieval-looking streetscape, accompanied by a great caption: “Edinburgh is to London as poetry is to prose.”
I’ve been to both cities and that’s a near perfect capsule review of the differences. Ok, I’m inspired to go back again.
In searching the Edinburgh activities list, I came across a few intriguing suggestions: Arthur’s Seat, a hikeable ancient volcano with spectacular views—hey Wanderfly I have some great pics of this if you’re interested—and a walking tour entitled “City of the Dead, which explores the city’s violent past.
Both of these ideas come from a site I hadn’t previously known about, called NileGuide, which seems to specialize in off-the-beaten-path journeys. To learn more, though, you leave Wanderfly country and take a side trip to NileGuide.
So why not jump to NileGuide or say Frommer’s directly? There’s nothing stopping you of course, but the value-add of Wanderfly and aggregators in general is their power to filter, edit, and organize all this data (while not encroaching on or competing head-on with their content providers).
There could be some improvements on this score: is it just me or are Wanderfly’s activity filters not working quite right? And I may be just overlooking something, but I’m not able to bookmark activities for a specific destination.
In any case, this is still an evolving site. And with its big buttons and immersive travel pics, I’ve no doubt that Wanderfly is poised to jump to a tablet computer with an appropriate app.
Now if they could just add some GPS smarts so that after I create my own itinerary, notifications will pop up when I pass an interesting piece of history, pub, or incredible view that I had bookmarked previously.
Related articles
- WanderFly Makes Time’s Top 10 (technoverseblog.com)
- Curated Wanderlists (wanderfly.com)
