Hey Millennial Nomads!

Pursuing on my series of "How to plan your future trip using social media", I wanted to tell you a quick hack you can use on Facebook. This is something available since a couple months now that I use quite often, but it is only when I introduced it to a friend of mine couple weeks back that I realized it was worth to share with you all! 

Let's be honest, nowadays, how many of you use yelp? trip advisor? or any other kind of travel forums? 

I personally do NOT. Why? because it is messy, too much to read and I don't know the people giving these recommendations, so I cannot relate if I would like doing something they enjoyed doing. Sounds fair!

However, I know my friends, and I know what they like. And most of the time, before going on a trip somewhere I would ask them for recommendations because I know we have pretty similar interests.

So here is the mind blowing tip of the day

Did you know that you can plan your trip using Facebook search? Yep, that's the search bar at the top of the page or with the magnify icon.

It is a very simple process, let me break it down for you:

On Desktop type your destination in the search bar

On mobile go into the menu and scroll down to "City Guides" in the explore tab

On desktop, select your destination in the drop down menu

On mobile, it will look like this

And voila you will be given recommendations by Facebook about places where to eat, where to drink, sightseeing activities, hotels and shopping.

And if you look closer at the results you will be able to see that some of your friends have already been to some of these places.                                                                            

You can actually click on "see more" in the category that interest you, a new page will be displayed and you will be able to filter your search by places visited by friends only and also by price. Pretty handy if you are on a budget. 

If you need more inspiration, you can scroll down to the "From friends tabs" and see the photos of their last trip. (for privacy reasons for my friends I cannot show you that part sorry, but you get the picture! ;) ) And if you need more info, you can always send them a message! 

The other interesting tab is "upcoming events". If you love going to concerts, festivals, theaters or any kind of exhibitions, it is worth having a look and check if there will be anything interesting during your visit.

And finally "popular nearby", if you have more than a weekend to spend and planning to go around the country, it is a great tool to use to plan your itinerary .

Main benefits

Easy to use

• You see where your friends have been and this can be a great topic to discuss with them. Who does not like talking about their past trips?

• You can see what events will be happening during your stay

• You can plan your travel itinerary

• You can do all of that within Facebook without opening any other websites!

Cons

• Cannot save itinerary offline. So, create a new album in your gallery and take lots of screenshots!

• City Guide seems to only focus on major international cities, and not the small

Nevertheless, it is a great tool to have an idea of a place you want to visit before making more advanced search.

That's it, you are all set to plan your next trip using Facebook and following the recommendations of your friends. Hope you learned something new today! 

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Safe travels!