We were excited to receive thousands of entries for our recent “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” contest sponsored by Kimpton Hotels. We’ve now secured all of the prizewinners and would like to extend our congratulations to you all and thank Kimpton Hotels, Eye-Fi and Peter Greenberg for providing prizes!

When I reached out to our grand prize winner, Natasha F. from Vienna, PA, she was very excited to have won a two-night stay with Kimpton Hotels and $500 spending money. She went on to tell me about the trip she had planned on TravelMuse, which I wanted to share:

“Also, wanted to add that the TravelMuse Web site is one of my favorites. It was a great resource in planning our New England Road trip. I printed out the customized travel brochure and put into a binder. It contained all our notes and reservations for our trip (which was crucial since we drove over 1500 miles and needed to be very organized for the multiple stops). TravelMuse was great in finding places I would not have known to go to without being able to search. Two destinations I completely attribute to TravelMuse are Waterfire in Providence, RI and Purgatory Chasm in MA. Additionally, having everything in one place online made it accessible to me at work and at home.

I plan on using TravelMuse for all my trips, especially road trips.”

I don’t think we could have picked a better winner if we’d tried, as Natasha fully mastered the planning tools on TravelMuse. She gladly agreed to talk to me by phone last Friday to provide more feedback on her experience.

Natasha explained that her primary motivation for taking her trip was that her husband wanted to eat lobster, and she wanted to go white-water rafting and visit Cape Cod. Apart from that, everything else was fair game.

What she liked about TravelMuse
Natasha had a lot of good things to share about planning a trip on TravelMuse:

•    Destination guide-style intros gave her some background on places.
•    Top bookmarked activities by other TravelMuse members provided helpful suggestions.
•    Articles about activities and events influenced a change in her itinerary to take in the first bonfire of the season at Waterfire.
•    TravelMuse Bookmarker made it easy to add any Web page to her trip.
•    Ability to edit and add scheduled details (e.g., bed and breakfast confirmations) kept everything in one place, making it easy to find.
•    The free custom pdf guide with all her trip information, maps and notes became her bible for her road trip.

What she thought we could improve on TravelMuse
Natasha didn’t have too many problems with TravelMuse:

•    Scheduling items became more difficult with a full Tripfolio and a packed schedule for a 10–day itinerary, as it was hard to drag and drop items far down the page. [This is a great piece of feedback and we are looking at how we can make this easier to use.]
•    A couple of great suggestions… [Sorry, I’m not going to post these gems. You’ll just have to watch this space!]

Natasha plans to use her “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” prize to plan a California wine country road trip.

Thanks Natasha for being a very well-deserved winner and for sharing some great user feedback with the TravelMuse team!