Small World redesigned for all your travel daydreams

Over the last many months, we’ve been working on tons of changes to Small World™. Most of the changes were under the hood – a complete rewrite, new sources of data, better search algorithms, additional photo and guide content and more. As with most ‘under the hood’ changes, almost all of them were unsung heroes – invisible to our users. But all the while, we were also tinkering with a complete overhaul of the Small World user experience.

Today, we’re taking the wraps off and launching a complete redesign of Small World, the simplest way to indulge all your travel daydreams.

Making travel daydreams simple takes centre-stage with a gorgeous map-based interface on Small World’s new home page. Dynamic orange markers for popular destinations appear and disappear as you zoom and pan through the map. Each destination marker reveals a hovercard with a beautiful handpicked photograph and information on pricing and more. A click on the hovercard lets you explore your dream destination in detail.

If you have a specific destination or place in mind, try a text search from the bar at the top of the page. If Small World finds a good or exact match for your search, we direct you straight to the page for that destination or place. If Small World finds multiple different matches for your search, we present you with a list of choices to select from. We’ve worked enormously hard to deliver a wide selection of travel destination content including guides, photos and traveller information.

Travel content is available from Flickr, Lonely Planet, Panoramio, Trip Advisor, Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Yahoo Geoplanet and Zomato. To give you a sense of the scale of Small World’s coverage, we now have 150 countries in Small World with more than 50 POIs each. The top 50 countries in Small World contain a total of over 250,000 POIs in categories such as sights, restaurants, bars, hotels and shopping. In addition, Small World has written guides for over 40,000 unique destinations and POIs; quite enough to satisfy your travel daydreams for a long while to come. We want Small World to have the very best travel content – in quality and quantity – and we know we’ve just scratched the surface here.

Small World now has new geospatial search capabilities. ‘Geospatial’ is a fancy way of saying you can search for things ‘in’ or ‘near’ or ‘around’. Give the new geospatial search a try with searches like hotels in Goa, hotels near Eiffel Tower, beaches in Italy or shopping in Dubai.

Small World’s new geospatial search technology is also hard at work in every destination guide with a section titled “Check out what’s nearby”:

We love the all-new Small World – it’s useful, it’s beautiful and it just works. It’s still just a hobby for us, but we think it’s the start of something big. We hope you love it too. Give it a whirl, daydreaming about travel has never been easier.