There is no question – booking accommodation is my least favourite step when preparing a trip. Usually I try everything to find a friend of a friend who will let me crash their couch, but that of course doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes I need to find a real bed, and then the endless search begins.
There are so many things to consider: how much money do I want to spend and what is included in the prize? Hotel, hostel, apartment or AirBnB? Which part of town is the best? Is WiFi complimentary? etc. It takes hours and days to browse hotel search engines and compare prizes. There are so many options and choosing the allegedly right one is so stressful that sometimes I wish I would not have booked the flight.
Reading reviews in particular is dragging me down. For every hotel there are a gazillion of comments and reviews available. A first glance at the ratings, then a quick browse through some of the 5 and 1 point reviews. All of a sudden you realise that someone complains a lot, because he didn’t expect that his room on a three star hotel in Italy wouldn’t have a jacuzzi. The rating system failed.
Quickly I leave the search engine and click through favourite blogs to find recommendations there – but alas, nobody has been there before! How am I ever going to find a reliable source telling me where to stay?
BUT a new player has entered the game: Yonderbound.
At first glance Yonderbound is a hotel search engine like any other. You enter a destination, the required dates and the engine spits out a list of hotels and hostels fitting these parameters. You can sort after prize, filter with more details, take a look at a city map locating the hotels, and read reviews. Only, Yonderbound doesn’t stop here – the magic lies in the little heart which you can see in the top right corner of every individual hotel on the list.
By creating an account with Yonderbound you can easily individualize the search engine and create so-called Yonderboxes. Think of them like scrapbooks in which you can collect your favourite hotels in one place and sort them in categories (like the kind of hotels, or their location). by clicking on the little heart you can save any hotel in one of your Yonderboxes. You could for example create a box containing all the hotels/hostels you stayed at during your last road trip, or inter rail journey – and then, someone else, looking for advice and recommendations on a similar itinerary, will find your box and plenty of suggestions on where to stay.
Bloggers can actually use the tool to collect their favourite hotels for their readers – for the hotel-needy follower it is a lot easier to navigate there than searching for individual blog posts containing hotel info. The Yonderboxes are a convenient short-cut.
We thought, we give the new platform a try (because we love scrapbooking!) and created a few Yonderboxes covering some of our favourite cities and regions. Maybe you are planning a trip to Berlin, skiing the Alps, a big Eurotrip on a budget, or an indulging get-away in a stylish design hotel.
Do you have a trip planned but can’t find the right place to stay? We’d love to know which Yonderboxes you would like us to create for you!
Photos by Kathi Kamleitner & Marie Pfisterer.
This is a post by Kathi Kamleitner.
Kathi Kamleitner was a regular contributor at Travelettes from 2013 to 2019. Originally from Vienna, Austria, she packed her backpack to travel the world and lived in Denmark, Iceland and Berlin, before settling in Glasgow, Scotland. Kathi is always preparing her next trip – documenting her every step with her camera, pen and phone.
In 2016, Kathi founded Scotland travel blog WatchMeSee.com to share her love for her new home, hiking in the Scottish Highlands, island hopping and vegan food. Follow her adventures on Instagram @watchmesee!
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