In our previous blog post Dream Now, Travel Later, we’ve mentioned the importance of keeping your dreams of travel alive. We cannot let a pandemic change the very way we want to interact with the world. We can still do things — just differently.

As many places are starting to lift lockdown measures, it’s time to start planning your travels…maybe a bit of staycation is well-needed!

Thinking about your next staycation

We’ve written a lot about travel. This includes Malta and the amazing food culture, Amsterdam and its countless boutique hotels, and Paris’ markets and museums.

But traveling to far-flung places will not be a possibility in the near future. So maybe a bit of staycation is in order to acquaint yourself with the beauty of your own country, read its history, discover its hidden gems, and travel with friends or family to not-too-distant places that keep your imagination alive.

Travel more responsibly

In this new era of travel, we can still have fun, eat out, drink more, and generally enjoy life. But just a bit differently.

Due to the lockdown, local restaurants, hotels, and bars have been struggling to survive, and farms serving these places that are currently closed have been forced to destroy millions of pounds of fresh food.

Supporting local businesses means supporting a city’s history. Think about it, when you go to a local café instead of a coffeehouse chain, you’re not just somewhere, drinking a cup of coffee. You’re in a place that’s owned by locals who’ve witnessed the city evolve through good and bad times and whose experiences are shaped by the conditions in the city itself. In a way, this local café represents a part of the city’s soul.

Traveling more responsibly isn’t hard. It’s just becoming slightly more aware of where we eat, sleep, and drink. While going local might not be the solution to everything, you’re already helping quite a fair bit by doing so.

Planning your staycation

Before, whenever I planned my travels, I always asked my friends who were locals in the countries I was visiting on their recommended places to go to. Sometimes, they ignored my text, and I had to nag them to create that recommendation list for me. It was a hassle, but my friends knew my tastes, so I trusted their recommendations over online reviews from strangers that I’ve never met in real life.

But recently, I’ve been using TWISPER to get the same recommendations, minus the nagging. TWISPER is a social travel app to discover and share great restaurants, hotels and bars through personal recommendations between the community of friends, partners, and influencers on the app.

I can just look through my friends’ recommendations and plan from there.

On TWISPER, you can add the places you want to visit to your Try Outs. For example, if you want to do a pub crawl in your local city, you can add the pubs you want to visit into your Try Outs. It’s the perfect app to plan your next travels with.

Not only can you find your friends’ best recommendations in that area, you can also follow the partners and ambassadors that have expert recommendations on where to go.

You won’t get any recommendations from anyone else that you’re not following. You only get them from users you’ve added or followed. This keeps the quality of the recommendations high while keeping the fake users out.

Where do you want to go next?

So where do you want to travel for your next staycation? Let me know on the TWISPER app :).