A new generation of travel-sharing Web sites matches travelers with knowledgeable locals for offbeat, authentic and mostly very economical experiences — across the globe or across town.
Witness, for example, Kieren Wuest, a business analyst from Sydney, Australia, who was in San Francisco not long ago for work. On his one morning off, Mr. Wuest, an amateur photographer, was looking for something slightly grittier than riding cable cars and shooting Victorian painted ladies. An Internet search led him to Vayable.com, where he found a $37 walking tour led by an author and artist who had spent 15 years documenting the city’s street art scene.
The guide, Russell Howze, is one of a growing number of artists, chefs, biologists, college students, authors, urban beekeepers, expats or hobbyists of one kind or another who are using travel-sharing platforms like CanaryHop, Gidsy, SideTour and Vayable to market their particular brand of expertise.
For the package-tour averse, this means a vastly expanded menu of opportunities. Want to take a private lesson with a Mongolian circus contortionist in Las Vegas? Learn about New York City’s garment district with a costume and wardrobe stylist? Fish a private bay off Qamea Island with Fijian royalty?
“Each experience is as unique as the person offering it and the person taking it,” said Jamie Wong, who co-founded Vayable last year. “It’s the way we all want to travel but haven’t been able to until now.”
These new services rely on free listings to fill out their catalogs. Some (SideTour, Vayable) put considerable effort into curating their offerings, vetting guides to be sure that they can deliver what they offer. Others (CanaryHop) leave it to peer reviews and the judgment of its users. Each handles online transactions between the parties, often charging travelers a small service fee and taking a 10 to 20 percent commission from guides on confirmed bookings.
Below, an overview of four travel-sharing services.
CanaryHop.com
One of the newest players in the field, CanaryHop started in March with a slick YouTube video starring the “Saturday Night Live” star Andy Samberg, who is also a founder of the site. In it, Mr. Samberg awakens to find he’s had an array of surprising experiences that could have been scenes from the Todd Phillips movie “The Hangover.”
In essence, CanaryHop works as a searchable list of some 2,500 guides and travel service providers, as well as a handful of vacation-rentals-by-owner.
Damon Spiegel, a founder, calls it “a modern-day classifieds for travel.” Guides and service providers are referred to on the Web site as “canaries.” Travelers are “hoppers.” The majority have yet to be reviewed by travelers, so you’re on your own to check the operator’s bonafides.
Sample experiences: Circus training in Las Vegas (one hour, $100); camping in the Mojave Desert with a botanist (seven days, $495); Amsterdam “Bar N Culture Tour” ($6.61 an hour); tuk tuk ramble in Bangkok (five hours, $39); New York City makeup and accessories tour (three hours, $250); home cooking and eating with a family in Delhi (six hours, $37).
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Gidsy.com
Gidsy, headquartered in Berlin, was founded by brothers from Amsterdam, Edial and Floris Dekker, who came up with the idea when they wanted to pick wild mushrooms for a risotto but didn’t know how to distinguish edible from poisonous varieties.
“Google-ing around,” Edial wrote in an e-mail, “we found that it was nearly impossible to find someone to schedule a mushroom picking tour.”
With high-profile investment funds from the actor Ashton Kutcher and others, the platform has grown in its first year to include offerings in nine cities, including Istanbul, San Francisco and Hasselt, Belgium. Gidsy charges its hosts and organizers a 10 percent fee and withholds payment until after the activity to encourage accountability.
Sample experiences: Istanbul street photography workshop with a professional photographer (three days, 300 euros, about $367); chocolate and grappa tasting in Hasselt (two to three hours, 35 euros); challah braiding and baking in New York (two to three hours, $5). Also, a tour of the red-light district in Amsterdam with a former police officer (1 ½ hours; 12.50 euros); tango lesson in London (1 ½ hours, £22, about $34); trend forecasting workshop in Ghent, Belgium (four hours, 10 euros).
SideTour.com
“The idea for SideTour was born of a trip my wife and I took two years ago,” Vipin Goyal wrote to me in an e-mail. “We left our jobs, sold almost all of our stuff and bought two plane tickets around the world. When I got back, I really wanted to continue that sense of exploration.”
Although there are plans to expand into other cities, SideTour’s current bailiwick is New York City — the idea being that there’s a world of experiences to be had just within the five boroughs.
Mr. Goyal started SideTour last July with a mission to dig up and package one-of-a-kind experiences. Its guides — all vetted by SideTour staff — include authors, artists, musicians, professional chefs, bartenders and restaurateurs, a farmer, a monk, a concert pianist and a handbag designer. Listings are updated weekly. The most popular activities sell out weeks in advance.
Sample Experiences: Craft beer brewing in Brooklyn (one day, $35); street art tour and graffiti demonstration in Long Island City, Queens (1 ½ hours, $35); foraging for edible plants in Brooklyn (two hours, $20); urban beekeeping in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (3 hours, $50). Also, butchering in Greenwich Village (three hours, $45); a conversation with the musician David Sanborn at the Core Club (1 ½ hours, $200); drinks at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill with a journalist from Rolling Stone (1 ½ hours, $20); dinner with an investment banker turned bhakti yogi (1 ½ hours, $20).
Vayable.com
When Jamie Wong was 8 years old, her third-grade class from the San Francisco area spent a week in Arizona with their pen pals on the Hopi reservation.
“We got an inside look into their lives, their families, their cultural traditions,” she said. “That was my first impression of what traveling was. That was what we wanted to do with Vayable: to link up travelers who wanted to go deeper with local experts worldwide.”
Years later, she gave up a job at “The Daily Show” in New York, moved back to the Bay Area and started building Vayable. The platform has grown to 1,500 guides on every continent but Antarctica. Users — either “explorers,” as Vayable calls them, or guides — create profiles and agree to follow guidelines. Travelers can search activities by city, then book their own experience or join another tour. All guides are screened.
Sample Experiences: Hookah and tea tour in Istanbul (three hours, $45); fly-fishing with the mayor of Kenai, Alaska (two days, $1,350; includes lodging and jet); dining with a Fijian king ($250 for up to six people). Also, a tour of East London street food ($48); a midnight street-food crawl in Queens (three hours, $48); a Harley-Davidson motorcycle tour of Versailles and Rambouillet (six hours, $310).
This article, “Click here for an offbeat experience,” originally appeared in The New York Times.
Copyright © 2012 The New York Times
