Top 10 tools for finding your travel inspiration for domestic trips
Staying closer to home during the global pandemic definitely changed our travel habits.
The most travel active population took advantage of domestic travel, visiting rural places with less population density, staying at short-time rental places with more safety and isolation.
This review covers the 10 most popular and useful travel tools for your travel inspiration and domestic travel planning.
Inspirational Search
Tools like Pinterest and Instagram are the popular starting point of visual travel research.
1. Pinterest
Pinterest has always been home for visual thinkers, designers, crafting people, apparel brands, and travel bloggers. The minimalistic cards and pins concept works well with basic traveler’s need — the next beautiful go-to place discovery.
Pinterest in a nutshell is the image search platform similar to Google images. So you should think keywords when using it.
The most popular search queries to try on Pinterest are “travel”, “travel destinations”, “places to go”, “travel aesthetic”.
You could always narrow down the results to be more regional-aware with the keywords like “travel destinations usa” or “travel destinations oregon”. So you could pick amazing destinations somewhere near your location.
Follow popular travel bloggers or agencies on Pinterest or a particular board of your choice, e.g., “best destinations in USA”. Create a dedicated board for the theme or region. Start pinning favorites cards to your boards so you can get back to your favorite pins whenever it is the right time to travel.
2. Instagram
Instagram is another visual platform for new destinations discovery and inspiration. On Instagram, you either search for people, hashtags, or places.
It goes without saying that the best Instagram experience is on the mobile app.
Unlike Pinterest there is no external link tied to the post on Instagram. So you’ll not find the travel guides there. Likely Instagram has post location tagging. Whenever you find the catchy image, you can easily discover the place where it was taken.
When you’re at the beginning of discovery mode, you usually want to start with hashtags, consistently building your following list, saving the posts, discovering new places.
It was impossible to search for multiple tags at once in a time of writing, but you could use a 3rd party tool for this. So it will take some time to find the right hashtags for your area to narrow down the search results.
The popular hashtags to try “#travelcalifornia” or “#travelusa”.
When you are done with initial destination research, you may dive deeper into certain place research, searching by place name rather than a certain hashtag.
This will give you even more visual insights into what you may expect from traveling to this place.
Although Pinterest and Instagram are both fantastic and visual inspirational tools on its own there are not giving you a bigger picture, why you want to choose this destination over another option. There is no rational, like better price or shorter travel time, whether the destination traits matching your travel style and past travel experience or not. It’s purely emotional, intuitive and often irrational choice.
3. TravelRank
TravelRank is a new destination discovery assistant. The core value proposition is in the smart, personalized recommendations based on the past traveler’s experience.
It combines visual inspirational approach, vivid images and data-driven approach. The path to the travel decision is sugnificantly shortened thanks to the manual search replacement with recommendations. Though you need to import or manually enter at least a fraction of your travel expereinces before the recommendations kick-in.
You start by importing or entering your travel history.
Once this is done, TravelRank will start serving its recommendations based on travel history. This includes the image gallery, meta-data for given recommendations like the top-scoring categories of given destination, best flight price and date, general information, what it’s known for, yearly weather statistics, and more.
As this information presented in the way that it’s easily comparable across other recommended destinations within a single screen, you could make an emotional and rational decision on where to go next.
Travel Magazines
Travel magazines and guides have been with us for ages. From printed encyclopedia-style publications and pocket-size booklets to modern eye-candy mobile applications. This medium is familiar, text-heavy, super detailed, and the best part — has the lowest entry barrier and zero learning curve.
The worst part? They are mostly all ads-driven sites. It means lots of flashing banners and slow pages.
4. Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a respectful and very well-known travel publication, still maintaining and producing both print and online versions of its famous guides.
The way how you navigate through Lonely Planet is quite traditional and conservative. You start with the Destinations section, drilling down through the continents to countries. Where you could drill further down to the city guides, or read the stories about given country, watch videos, find attractions or even make bookings.
The content library of Lonely Planet is HUGE. It combines convenient, structured, and well-crafted guides and map views with more popular now formats like video and story-like travel reports. Beware, it’s quite easy to lose yourself and be overwhelmed with so much information.
5. Jetsetter
Jetsetter is a modern travel magazine, providing travel insights, destination and hotel reviews, and insider deals.
The way how Jetsetter describes itself:
“Jetsetter is your most well-traveled friend, the one with great taste and inside connections, who you call when you need advice on where to go, where to stay, and what to do when you get there”.
The insights and recommendations are based on the editor’s and correspondent's personal experience, standards, and opinions.
You start selecting the categories you want to explore: Beach, Outdoors, Romantic, Food, Luxury. You’ll be presented with a selection of stories about destinations corresponding to these categories. It may contain travel tips, hotel recommendations, places to eat, and more.
The best way of navigating through Jetsetter is the site search. Just enter “Cancun,” and you’ll find hundreds of articles on Cancun resorts, including editorial reviews and travel tips.
6. Culture Trip
Culture Trip is an award-winning travel media known for its inspirational content that goes beyond the obvious travel info. Driven by the vision of “making the culture globally and universally accessible,”.
Culture Trips covers many cultural aspects apart from travel, like food, art, entertainment, etc. The stories are written by passionate locals and in-house journalists.
The discovery phase on Culture Trips starts in the Destinations section. The overall process is similar to the Lonely Planet. You’ll be moving from regions, countries to destination experiences, saving the favorite content to My Plans.
Like Jetsetter and Lonely Planet, the best way to experience the Culture Trip is by using the site search.
Of course, you already need to have a shortlist of the places for your in-depth research. Instagram, Pinterest, or TravelRank could help you with that.
7. Dorsia
Dorsia is a new kid on the block with an interesting viewpoint on travel and provocative messaging.
“A travel app for “untourists” and lifestyle brand for people who hate lifestyle brands, Dorsia is the ultimate cool friend that knows all the right places”.
Dorsia is a “no-bs” curated travel guide covering 20 major cities that everyone wants to go to.
The best way to find your travel inspiration on Dorsia it’s by browsing the cities catalog. It’s small, cozy, and manually curated.
It has a detailed guide for each city, covering places to go, places to eat, cool facts about the city, best neighborhoods, and map views for the places and itinerary.
8. Trippin
Trippin is an influential travel community spawned out of the Facebook group. It delivers on a cultural, social, travel, and creativity intersection.
The essence of Trippin is the stories produced by the community and influenced by the underground scene. Written guides and audio, video content create a unique ecosystem for travel inspiration.
Trippin has 80+ cities covered with multiple stories produced by community members, musicians, founders, DJs.
Trippin works the best when you know what’s a destination where you’re heading to. Browser the guides, find the target city, and follow the vibe.
Virtual Tours
Virtual tours could be especially handy in the total absence of travel possibilities and during the lockdowns. Just to scratch your wanderlust a little bit and stay positively motivated for future traveling.
It could also be easily adapted to your inspirational research too.
9. City Walks
City Walks name speaks for itself.
It’s a collection of pre-recorded street videos from 60+ places all over the world. You don’t know the route or duration of the walk. It’s surprisingly fun.
The best way to use it? Just click them all for a quick preview and see which vibe of the streets brings the most emotions and joy.
You can submit your walk too!
10. AirPano
AirPano is a fantastic collection of pre-recorded 360° photos and videos.
The materials were taken from 400 famous places throughout the world. Including aerial and underwater shots. The fun part — you could even interact with them by moving the camera like in AR games!
The best way to use AirPano in your travel research is by searching for the target destinations.
They have tons of photos and videos that are constantly updated with new additions each week. It’s only possible to see them all through by canceling your Netflix and dedicating this time to AirPano.
It was your top 10 tools for finding travel inspiration for domestic trips.
Feel free to check our guide on how to find cheap flights to anywhere during COVID.
Regardless of what you prefer, visual, traditional, or innovative travel research style, I hope you found at least one new inspirational tool of your choice.
Do you consider traveling in 2021?
What your favorite tools of choice for inspirational search?
Drop some comments below!
Alex Shevchuk, Founder of TravelRank.
