WanderMates Reviews

“I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills”, said William Wordsworth. If Wordsworth had known about Wander Mates, he might not have been traipsing through the hills on his lonesome. At least that’s the aim of WanderMates: find friends and events whilst on your travels.

It does this through a sort of “advertisement” system whereby members put up a post outlining their plan (let’s say “I am going to the food market in central Bangkok”) and you can simply contact them to say you’d like to join them. It sounds easy, but unfortunately we found the system to be problematic at times. What’s more, the site is just a little confusing and quite bland to navigate. However, there are some positives so read on...

Let’s start with those high points. The idea is a good one: you place an ad, people say they’d like to join you, you meet up. Or you respond to an activity idea. There’s also the opportunity for solo travelers and female travelers to find like-minded adventurers. Signing up is easy and requires that you answer a few questions or allow the site access to your Facebook profile. We also like the fact that if you can’t find an event in your area (or soon-to-be area), then you can request alerts which tell you when something is happening near you.

However, in our experience these alerts are essential because finding an event near you isn’t always very easy. The first issue here is site navigation. It’s hard to know exactly what to do on the site as it’s not completely intuitive and there’s little information telling you how to go about finding travel friends. We tried to find events and chums in a few locations across the globe but had no results.

You can place your own advert in the hope that someone will find you, but since we tried a few major world cities and got nothing, we wouldn’t hold too much hope for success. Although there were posts for potential meet-ups, they were relatively hard to locate and it seemed that there weren’t very many.

The event descriptions were also quite brief so it was hard to tell whether or not we’d like to go at all. Sometimes the events were as basic as, “Let’s meet for a coffee, I’m leaving in 2 days.” Well coffee is nice but why would you want to meet a stranger for a coffee if they’re disappearing soon after? This isn’t really the fault of the site but they could work on making sure the events posted are at least travel related and allow you to forge relationships.,

It is made clear that this is not a dating website and, with the special focus on providing match ups for single female travellers, it seems like WanderMates has put some thought into safety. But there’s simply a lack of things to do here. You can’t really build your profile much or search for people in a specific area with a certain interest, which seems like a great shame.

At the moment, you just have to be lucky and hope to find someone who is doing something in an area you’re traveling to, at the same time you’re there. Unfortunately, it seems like using Wander Mates alone might leave you wandering  "lonely as a cloud". 

Check out our #1 rated site instead! Why not check out Travel Buddies, our top rated Travel Companion Website and winner of our prestigious Gold Award! You can also check out our Top 10 Travel Companion Websites here!

Click on the button below to check out WanderMates.com for yourself...