Brought to you by Yonderbound
Do you love to plan out your travels weeks before you leave or are you a turn up on the day and see what you can get sort of traveller?
For me, it depends on how I’m travelling.
If I’m travelling in my camper trailer, as I am now, or if I’m backpacking, I’m comfortable just to rock up.
Although I do have a good friend in the hosteling industry who has told me the days of just rocking up at hostels to land a bed are fading away due to the ease of and increase in online bookings.
If I’m planning a short-term break, where I just want to arrive and not have to worry about anything, then I like to plan ahead. For those shorter holidays I also want a little more comfort as I’m travelling more for indulgence, destination highlights and relaxation.
Researching online can be a whole lot of fun IF you have a good system in place and the right kind of tools to use.
I generally leave the hotel research and booking sites to Craig because they do my head in. They’re not very inspiring and leave me with notes and bookmarks everywhere.
Until Yonderbound.
Yonderbound Helps You Plan Your Trip
Yonderbound is a planning and booking site for hotel stays around the world.
It helps you plan, shortlist, share, and book your destination hotels. It acts a little like Pinterest and Trover in that you can create boards, called yonderboxes, which you add your potential or dream hotels into.
A yonderbox is like a travel scrapbook, a place where you keep hotel ideas and notes for your trip. You make your own or follow other boxes including those offering expert tips from travel advisors and bloggers.
Yonderbound came at the right time for me because we are currently considering a holiday over Christmas in Bali. (Yes we need a holiday from the holiday) I’ve got yoga retreat in Ubud calling me, but I’m not sure the rest of the fam will be happy with me leaving them all.
So I jumped on Yonderbound to create a yonderbox of hotel options for Bali.
Searching for Hotels on Yonderbound
Yonderbound acts like a typical search engine.
Type in your destination, dates and people in your travelling party and it will return the results. You can filter by distance, price, or trip advisor reviews. You can select map or grid view for the results.
I love how the design of Yonderbound is very modern and clean. It’s very sticky, which means it inspires you to stay on and click around.
Yes. you could get lost on there for awhile.
It’s addictive like Pinterest and Trover too because suddenly you want to start creating lists for all your dream bucket destinations and experiences.
Each hotel comes up with a price, information on the hotel, a map, the facilities available and reviews from Trip Advisor direct on the information page.
I really liked this feature and not having to click over to Trip Advisor. The reviews really helped me to decide whether to add the hotel as a possible to my yonderbox or not.
I also liked how the results gave you the figure for one night but also totaled up your entire stay once you clicked on the hotel to see more information.
How to Create Yonderboxes
A yonderbox is easy to create.
You find the hotels you are interested in and then add them to your yonderbox. You create a yonderbox based upon the destination you are visiting or the experience you are wanting to have around the world.
So for example, we created this yonderbox on Luxury accommodation in Australia.
These are the places we’ve had on our Australia bucket list for years.
We haven’t made them happen yet, but I’m a big believer in the power of vision boards helping to create your desires and I like how I can easily set up this one purely just for hotels.
Now I have these boards set up, it’s so easy for me to find them again if the opportunity to stay arises in the future. I can just jump back into my yonderbox to see the price and availability and book directly from there.
You can add in any special notes for any of the hotels you add to your yonderbox, which is such a helpful tool for planning and finally deciding which place or places to stay in.
It can help you remember why you liked a certain place or what are the stand outs.
When we are looking at so many places it is easy to forget and time consuming to go back and reread information and reviews.
Yonderboxes are displayed beautifully as well with big thumbnail images and separated into locations..
Yonderboxes are great for family or group trips
Travelling with other family members or a group of friends?
Yonderboxes are great as you can share them with anyone via email or Facebook. It makes it much easier to decide which hotel will suit all members of the travelling party best.
Yonderboxes give great tips
The other cool features of the yonderboxes is you can research what other people have discovered and pinned to their yonderbox.
So when searching for hotels in Bali, under my listing showcased Yonderboxes that had already featured places in Bali. I clicked on one called Best hotel pools and found the famous Rock Bar in Bali. I easily then added it to my list.
If you have a destination in mind, research that in the explore section of Yonderbox first as someone else may have done all the planning and itinerary for you. I’ve seen yonderboxes in there for Best Eco Resorts, Greek island hopping, or Get naked and unwind.
I bet the Kimberley region in Western Australia is listed in that one as I’m currently sweltering and contemplating the naked thing!
We’ve put together a yonderbox of the hotels we’ve stayed in on our Australian road trip as an easy reference guide for you. You can find it here.
We also put together a yonderbox of our favourite Gold Coast accommodation here. We’ve stayed at all of these properties and there is a wide variety to suit any type of traveller.
Yonderbound is New and in BETA
Don’t be frightened by the beta.
Beta is an awesome opportunity to share your views and be involved in something from the beginning. I love how Yonderbound are asking what users think.
It’s an awesome chance to share your ideas on how Yonderbound could be improved.
Here are my suggestions:
- The ability to search hotels by features. I would have loved to have searched “health retreats in Bali” to save me time looking at each property to see if they offered that service. I know how much families would love to search for “kids club”.
- You can’t search directly for a particular hotel you want.
- Searching via flexible dates, or no dates, would be great. Often you’re just poking around to find interesting places and are unsure of when you want to go. So for the dreamers the ability to search for what’s available without any dates would be a good idea. I had trouble finding the properties I wanted for my Luxury accommodation in Australia board as I had to get the right availability for the hotel to show. A needle in a haystack kind of thing.
- A greater range of hotel options, including hostels!. Yonderbound is new so I’m sure the inventory will start to grow as it does. But, they do already have 383,693 hotels in 192 countries so that’s a pretty awesome start.
You can sign up for your free Yonderbound account here.
[Question] Do you see Yonderbound being a useful resource? What’s the first yonderbox you’re going to create? [/question]
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