Make Your Next Trip Extraordinary
Our Mission: To Save the World From Mediocre Trips
Wendy is one of the most trusted voices in travel. Town&Country magazine calls her “The Travel Whisperer” who will take you “as close as you can get to vacation perfection.” Condé Nast Traveler praises “The Wizardry of Wendy” and her “encyclopedic knowledge of all things travel.” After 30 years as a travel advice columnist and consumer advocate, first at Condé Nast Traveler and then at TripAdvisor, Wendy has amassed comprehensive knowledge of the world’s best travel solutions and fixers. By popular demand from her longtime readership of sophisticated frequent travelers, she has created a unique system designed to help travelers benefit from those solutions and fixers in order to get the high caliber of trip that they are looking for. Here’s how you too can get the best trips possible.
As the Director of Consumer News and Digital Community at Condé Nast Traveler, Wendy wrote her practical advice column, The Perrin Report, for 17 years and her award-winning blog, The Perrin Post, for eight years. She started out long ago as the magazine’s Ombudsman (consumer advocate), investigating reader complaints about travel companies and helping wronged travelers get compensation, and that led to her book Wendy Perrin’s Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know (Fodor’s). As TripAdvisor’s first-ever Travel Advocate, she advised its more than 315 million monthly visitors—the world’s largest travel community.
Wendy has been a keynote speaker at conferences worldwide, on cruise ships, at Harvard University, and at the United Nations. Television appearances include The Today Show, Good Morning America, and many programs on CNN. She has won the Travel Journalist of the Year award, earned a Lowell Thomas award for investigative journalism, and been a finalist for a National Magazine Award—the magazine industry’s most prestigious editorial honor. She graduated cum laude from Harvard, where she majored in History and Literature.
Meet the Team
Brook on safari in South Africa
Brook Wilkinson, Executive Editor
Brook’s work as a travel writer and former Condé Nast Traveler editor has taken her all over the globe: She’s trained with Surf Life Savers in Australia, plowed fields with rice farmers in Bali, and stood at the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Brook has been testing travel planners alongside Wendy—through both interviews and firsthand experience—since 2002, and has personally met nearly every Trusted Travel Expert on our WOW List.
Favorite WOW Travel Moment: Catching the look of awe on her son’s face the first time he encountered a lion on safari.
Nichole visiting an Old Quebec heritage fresco depicting an ancestor, a Canadian sea explorer.
Nichole Bernier, Special Projects Director
Nichole whetted her appetite for travel early in her career (with Wendy!) as an editor at Conde Nast Traveler magazine writing news features, consumer advocacy columns, and covering ski and golf resorts. (Her first time playing a full 18 holes of golf was at Pebble Beach, where she whiffed the ball at the first tee in front of a crowd. Oops.) She has written about active travel and wellness for Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, Psychology Today, Health, Elle, Boston Magazine, Gourmet, and NPR. She lives near Boston with her family, and is happiest seeing a new place from her bicycle.
Favorite WOW Travel Moment: Crossing treetop rope bridges in Costa Rica with her five kids.
Tim with a tiger fish he caught in Zambia.
Timothy Baker, Contributing Photographer
Tim had been to 80 countries on seven continents before meeting Wendy. He had even lived in a tent in Antarctica (as an expedition photographer for Greenpeace) and on a yacht in Fiji (teaching underwater photography). A photojournalist and photo editor formerly with The New York Times, the Associated Press, and European Stars & Stripes, Tim is now contributing the many pictures he shoots on trips with Wendy.
Favorite WOW Travel Moment: Catching this tiger fish in the Zambezi.
Charlie snapped this selfie with a quokka (a cute little marsupial) on Rottnest Island off Australia’s western coast.
Charlie
Wendy’s son Charlie, 22, just spent a semester abroad in Sydney traveling to every state in Australia. Now he’s backpacking through Asia before a summer program in environmental design at Berkeley, and then it’s back to Vanderbilt in Nashville for his senior year. His travels in 70 countries have left him with plenty of advice for parents looking for a trip to thrill their kids and teens. He started his own travel blog when he was eight.
Favorite WOW Travel Moment: Jumping off the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand.
Doug cooking lunch for new friends in Uzbekistan.
Doug
Wendy’s son Doug, 20, has made a lot of friends during his travels in 60 countries. How? “Bring a soccer ball,” says Doug. “You can even leave the soccer ball with them when you go home, so they remember you.” He also plays public pianos wherever he finds them. “When you sit down and play a piano, people come up and start to talk to you.” And, when invited into people’s homes, he doesn’t just eat their food; he cooks for them, to give them a taste of his home too.
Favorite WOW Travel Moment: Paragliding over Masada in Israel.
What We Do
WendyPerrin.com is a travel publication, a complimentary advisory service, and the culmination of Wendy’s 30-year quest to make travel better. We don’t book or sell trips. We share honest information and advice about where to go and how to plan it so as to get the best trip possible. We maintain a WOW List of destination-specific trip designers about whom we have received especially impressive reviews and feedback from the travelers we’ve sent to them (see FAQ #13 in our WOW List Frequently Asked Questions). If a traveler needs a trip designer with a specific skill set, we can suggest experts whom we think would make a good match. We also offer Wendy’s WOW approach to trip planning: If you use any of the trip questionnaires on WendyPerrin.com to start a trip, we will advise you during the planning process, watch over your trip from start to finish, and invite you to review it afterward. You can read these reviews to get a sense of the standard to which we (and our readers) hold WOW List trip planners.
Code of Ethics
The editors of WendyPerrin.com may sometimes accept reduced rates or complimentary arrangements to cover our travel costs when we’re on assignment. Sponsors must agree that their support offers no guarantee of coverage and will not influence our reporting. We believe you appreciate and value such transparency. You’ve come to expect unbiased coverage from Wendy, and she is not about to squander a reputation for credibility, built over 30 years, for a free trip.
No advertiser, sponsor, or other entity that helps fund this website is allowed to dictate, impact, or alter our editorial coverage, recommendations, advice, opinions, or reviews. We are journalists and travel experts who would never jeopardize your trust in us by recommending a travel product we are not comfortable with, or placing a weak trip planner on The WOW List, no matter how much they wanted to pay us. Wendy’s name, and the standard of travel she stands for, are worth a lot more than that. Besides, if The WOW List were pay-to-play, there would be 5,000 travel agents on it.
How We’re Funded
We have worked very hard to create a site that can be self-sustaining and that enables us to put our readership’s needs, and each traveler’s bottom line, first and foremost. We accept advertisers, host conferences with sponsors, and earn speaking fees. We may (or may not) receive payment from WOW List trip planners for the right to use the WOW List logo in their own company’s marketing materials. If you decide that a trip planner we’ve recommended is a good match and you decide to move forward with that trip planner and buy a trip, then after you return we may (or may not) receive a referral fee. That fee does not impact the trip cost (see The WOW List Pledge). To get a sense of the standard to which we (and our readers) hold WOW List trip planners, you can read these reviews.
How to Support Us
When you use Wendy’s WOW approach, which means you start a trip by filling out one of the trip questionnaires on this website, it supports our ability to advise you on a complimentary basis. It also supports the tremendous amount of labor and time involved in finding, vetting, testing, and continuously monitoring the trip planners who are currently on The WOW List, as well as those whom we are testing behind the scenes for possible inclusion on The WOW List. We also accept advertisers on our website; they are chosen only from a pool of products and services that Wendy herself feels comfortable with, and their presence is clearly marked as an ad (for example, you can see the Medjet advertisement that lives on many pages).
How You Can Benefit
The trip planners on The WOW List have signed The WOW List Pledge, promising VIP benefits and priority status for “Wendy’s travelers” — meaning, the travelers who use the trip questionnaires on WendyPerrin.com. The WOW List Pledge requires these trip planners to provide special treatment, fair pricing, and great value to Wendy’s travelers. You are welcome to grab a name off The WOW List and contact that trip planner on your own, but if you do, you won’t get Wendy’s advice, help, or benefits. You won’t get to submit a review of the trip planner, which means you won’t get to help your fellow travelers, whose reviews—here’s a sampling—serve as a uniquely useful and empowering resource to our community of sophisticated, frequent travelers. You won’t get “Wendy’s WOW Moments” either. You can read about our WOW Moments Project here: Wendy Wants To Amp Up Your Trip!
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Wendy in the News
Watch for Wendy in the press and on TV. Here are a few recent appearances.
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