How to work the Trazzler system...

We've received a lot of feedback over the past month about the recommendations that Trazzler makes. First off, thank you for all of the suggestions, bug reports, complaints... We're working on improving the IQ of the Travel Personality aspect of Trazzler--and it's taking some time, because we really want to weigh many different variables. When we launch the new version, we'll let you know here.

As it is now, the trip recommendations are very heavily weighted toward weekend trips in your region--but this will change. Version 2.0 will look at the trips in your Wishlist and trips that you "Send to a Friend" and will use the locations and tags to determine where you want to go and what kinds of trips most interest you.

In the meantime, there are thousands and thousands of trips on Trazzler and several different ways to trazzle through a fascinating stream of them.

You can always click on a region or country in the right column ("browsing mode") to jump to another part of the world and start skipping through trips (what we call trazzling) and adding them to you wishlist. Just pick a trip in a given place and you'll start fanning out from that point. You can control the types of places you'll see by choosing a strategic location. For example, somewhere like the island of Cyprus...

http://www.trazzler.com/trips/countries/cyprus

will give you a pretty quirky mix of trips from every side of the Mediterranean... Or for an eclectic mix in the Indian Ocean, Australia, SE Asia, start here...

http://www.trazzler.com/trips/countries/christmas-island

You can do the same by using the tags (romantic, outdoors, beach, culinary, etc.):

http://www.trazzler.com/trips/tags/beach
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/tags/culinary

We also use the tags to mark trips written by our new freelancers and for our monthly contest:

Freelancers:
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/tags/freelancer
November Urban Enigma Contest:

http://www.trazzler.com/trips/tags/urban-enigma

If you are really brave, you can dive straight into the tag cloud.. the bigger the font, the more trips for that tag:

http://www.trazzler.com/tags/cloud

I always try to go crazy with the tags on the trips I publish, so you're sure to find some attention grabbers in there.

You can also see a list of recently published Trazzler trips here:

http://www.trazzler.com/trips/new-to-trazzler

Whatever you add to your Wishlist or send to a friend now is being registered as a preference and will help the site to start making smarter suggestions once we launch the new "algorithm" (this is the incredibly geeky term they use for the math behind choosing trips for a given user).

You can also try changing your location under your account settings if you want to "go" somewhere different for a while.

I hope this will give you plenty of places to explore while we get the bigger, better, faster, stronger (bionic?) algorithm ready.

--Megan