1 Travel Reviews

While it’s true the ReviewerCard may be the worst idea of the millennium so far, there’s no denying online reviews have come to wield great power in the modern commercial sphere. In travel, an outstanding hotel or tour review on TripAdvisor or Booking.com can inspire an entire trip, while a seething review or any mention of bed bugs can kill the momentum entirely. Your reviews direct the travels of others, and yet you don’t see a dime for your efforts.

Until now, that is. Two newish start-ups are threatening to rewrite two different travel models by leveraging the unmatched expertise, and reach, of the masses. And both tease the prospect of a payout for your travel curating:

Yonderbound
The video above does a pretty good job laying out the Yonderbound model, but to reiterate: You, as a registered user (it’s free), build out packages of travel inspiration wrapped around a theme like “New York Hotels” or “Best Waterfalls.” These are called Yonderboxes. The key here is the 380, 000+ partner hotels, which you must make sure to include in your Yonderboxes. Anytime someone books a hotel through one of your boxes, you receive 70% of the commission as Yondercredit (on average $7 for every $100 in booked travel), which in sufficient quantities can be flipped for real travel.

Rollinglobe
Rollinglobe is basically a crowd-sourced – and IATA-accredited – travel agent. The site requests a similar time investment but perhaps superior creativity in return for its own promise of non-guaranteed compensation, which as necessary comes through PayPal, check or bank transfer. Just curate a travel itinerary in the way a traditional human travel agent would, patching together swathes of experience in one area into a bookable holiday. Two churches, two museums, a town square, a ghost tour and cable car ride to a steakhouse with views – maybe that’s how you define Montreal, and maybe it’s not, but if you package it that way, and another user requests to book that package, you’ll get paid an unspecified cut of what Rollinglobe gets for fulfilling the order.