Get ready for another month filled with interesting and fun virtual events! The Wanderful community hosts online events for travelers and travel content creators to connect, learn, and celebrate our shared love of travel.
Interested in joining the conversation? We’re a welcoming membership community and we would love to have you join us! Learn all about joining the Wanderful community and check out the many membership benefits, including attending events for free.
Here are our top virtual events for travelers and creators in March 2021.
Wanderful’s March Rundown
- March 4: Wanderful Women Wednesday: Our Cornerstone Travel Chat!
- March 6: Travel Hacking Master Class with Julia Menez, Travel Hacking Coach
- March 9: The Myths and Truths of Being a Solo Female Traveler
- March 18: Pandemic Pivots: Celebrating Triumphs in Turbulent Times
- March 19: How to Book Freelance Writing Gigs and Where to Find Them
- March 25: Where to Go and When with Sherry Ott
- March 31: How to Find Opportunities to Travel Solo on a Budget
Virtual Events for Travel Lovers
March 4: Wanderful Women Wednesday: Our Cornerstone Travel Chat!
Free for Wanderful members, open to the public
Sisterhood, snacks, and socializing: welcome to Wanderful Women Wednesdays!
Wanderful Women Wednesday is our signature monthly event, connecting our travel loving community together in cities around the world. We’ll host themed conversations over our shared love of travel and gain forever friendships in the process.
Each event will be hosted by a different director of one of our 50+ amazing Wanderful chapters who will pick a monthly conversation theme and ask questions so we can share our favorite travel stories.
This event is great for:
- Anyone who loves to travel
- Travel creators + small business owners
- Members of the travel industry
- And more!
Free for Wanderful Members!
Are you a member of Wanderful? All members get *free* access to this event and events in Wanderful chapters around the world, plus an exclusive online member community, monthly webinars and learning tools, and so much more. To learn more about being a member, click here. Prices start at only $9/month, so it already pays for itself from our Wanderful Women Wednesday events every month!
Members, you can register to attend this event for free right here!
Our prize this month: We’re excited to offer a super fashionable DELSEY PICPUS messenger bag to one lucky winner at this month’s Wanderful Women Wednesday! Make sure you’re there live when we do the drawing!
This month’s hostess + theme: This month, WWW will be hosted by Teresa Willis, chapter director of Wanderful St. Louis, and we’ll talk about travel gear and souvenirs! Feel free to bring a favorite travel souvenir to show off during the event if you like (completely optional) or just join for the fun chat.
How to participate: Bring a snack, beverage of your choice, and find a comfortable, relaxing spot. Turn your video on (or leave it off if you feel more comfortable that way). We welcome all Wanderful members for a fun time together!
March 6: Travel Hacking Master Class with Julia Menez, Travel Hacking Coach
Free for Wanderful members, open to the public
Travel hacking is the art of getting free travel by leveraging the loyalty programs set by airlines, hotels, and credit cards.
Travel hacking coach and podcaster, Julia Menez from Geobreeze Travel, will teach you how to get started in the game of points and miles. Julia will cover the 4 steps you need in order to get started with travel hacking, resources to help you stay organized, and how to use travel hacking to boost your credit score and avoid ever paying credit card interest.
Additionally, you’ll get a special downloadable gift for attending — Julia’s hotel upgrade email template that she uses to get free upgrades all over the world!
Free for Wanderful Members
Are you a member of Wanderful? All members get *free* access to this event and events in Wanderful chapters around the world, plus an exclusive online member community, monthly webinars and learning tools, and so much more. To learn more about being a member, click here. Prices start at only $9/month, so it already pays for itself from this event alone!
Members, you can register to attend this event for free right here!
How to Participate: Find a comfortable, relaxing spot and join us on Zoom (link will be shared with all who register). Turn your video on (or leave it off if you feel more comfortable that way). We welcome all for a fun time together!
About the Presenter: Julia Menez is a travel hacking coach, speaker, and founder of Geobreeze.
After traveling to more than 30 countries before the age of 30 and saving thousands of dollars each year by travel hacking, Julia distills the strategies from top travel hackers around the world in her Geobreeze Travel podcast, and prepares personalized points and miles strategy plans for her private coaching clients.
Julia has been a speaker for events such as FinConX, and has led a travel hacking workshop for thousands of registered attendees at the SHEFACTOR 2020 Launch Your Life Summit, an event that featured speakers such as Bethany Hamilton, Kaitlyn Bristowe, and Missy Franklin. She has also been featured in numerous business and travel podcasts.
March 9: The Myths and Truths of Being a Solo Female Traveler
Free for Wanderful members and the public
Are you ready to travel the world solo safely and confidently so you can finally check off all of your travel dreams off of your bucket list? Well, you are in for a treat. Solo travel expert, travel host, and founder of the popular travel website TrustedTravelGirl.com, Valerie Joy Wilson, is going to uncover the myths and truths of being a solo female traveler and teach us how to stay safe, build confidence, and bust through your solo travel fears with ease!
About the Presenter, Valerie Joy Wilson
Valerie Joy Wilson is a solo travel expert, travel host, and founder of the popular travel website, TrustedTravelGirl.com. As a full-time traveler, Valerie loves to venture off-the-beaten-path, discover hidden gems only locals know about, and help women travel better. A self-proclaimed experience junkie with no comfort zone, Valerie continues to scare her parents with her worldwide adventures. Valerie has been featured on CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, and more. Follow Valerie on her global travels on her Instagram, Youtube, and TrustedTravelGirl.com.
March 28: Where to Go & When with Sherry Ott
Free for Wanderful members and the public
Have you ever thought: I have to figure out where to go in April for spring break? or Where can I go to escape the crowds in August? or I’m ready to find an incredible epic trip to take after I get the vaccine in October.
In this webinar, Where to Go & When you’ll hear from Sherry Ott, a world traveler who compiled this information from 14 years of non-stop travel. One thing most people agree on during and after COVID, is they want to go to places that aren’t crowded or necessarily well-known. That may mean isolated destinations, remote outdoor places, urban settings that are lesser known, or maybe you want to just stick to small towns. This webinar will help determine where you can find those places.
About the Presenter, Sherry Ott
I quit my corporate IT job in 2006 and said goodbye to blackberries (no smart phones yet in 2006!), meetings, and New York City. My original intention was to simply take a career break and come back after a year and determine next steps. I traveled around the world to 23 countries, finding a new exciting world outside of my office walls. My eyes were opened to possibilities and the beauty of simplicity; I didn’t want to go back to my old corporate existence. Instead I sold my possessions and relocated to Vietnam for one year in order to keep traveling. To make money I taught ESL, sold photography, and started really working at building a blogging and writing presence, including launching my other career break travel website, Meet Plan Go!
Since leaving Vietnam in 2009, I have stayed on the road and have built up the Ottsworld Travel Blog, built a freelance writing/photography career, do public speaking, and consult/participate on social media marketing campaigns.
While doing all of this, I wandered around the world solo without a home – no kids, husband, boyfriend (they would all just slow me down!) and spent 13 years living out of a suitcase and experiencing the world through housesitting, volunteering, writing assignments, and anything else that sounded exciting and came with a bed.
In 2017 I finally settled into a home base again in Denver; my nomadic lifestyle needed to come to an end.
I continue to travel from my home base in Denver. And when I’m home, I foster kittens.
March 31: How to Find Opportunities to Travel Solo on a Budget
Free for Wanderful members, open to the public
There are so many different ways to travel solo and each one can uncover a new way to learn about a place and it’s history and culture.
In this session, Dr. Nabila Ismail, pharmacist and travel content creator, will share some of the ways she has been able to travel solo without breaking the bank, both as a student or a working professional.
Join us to learn more about scholarship and fellowship opportunities, different programs like working as an au pair or at a hostel, and so much more!
About the Presenter: Dr. Nabila Ismail, PharmD, works in health tech by day and is a travel blogger at Dose of Travel by night. Her travel bug kicked in at age 14, and since then she has solo traveled to 36 countries as a full-time Doctoral student on her own dime. She won a research grant to go to Uganda, a press trip to Palm Springs, safari at the Serengeti in Tanzania, and even visited the remote island, Easter Island. Nabila aims to empower everyone to step outside their comfort zone, dream big, and to travel solo at least once. Follow along with Nabila on Instagram!
Virtual Events For Travel Content Creators
March 18: Pandemic Pivots: Celebrating Triumphs in Turbulent Times
For Wanderful Creator Members + free to the public
It’s been an entire year since the travel and tourism industry was forced into a standstill and our world was irrevocably changed by COVID-19. While there has been much anguish, loss, and grief, the last year has also been a time of ingenuity, reimagining, and new possibilities for our industry.
Join Wanderful in celebrating some of the travel industry’s most fruitful pandemic pivots. We’ll chat with Stephen Oddo, the CEO & Co-Founder of Walks, Annie Agnone, Programming & Operations Manager of Experiences at Atlas Obscura, and Stephanie Flor, the Founder of Around The World Beauty about their business’ experiences with the pandemic, the challenges they’ve had to face, and the opportunities this turbulent time has presented.
This is a FREE event, open to the public. It is an example of a Wanderful event that you otherwise would only find in our member community. Learn more here about becoming a Wanderful member where you’ll have access to daily events like this one all year round + so much more!
Members, you can register to attend this event for free right here!
About the panelists:
Annie oversees online courses at Atlas Obscura and co-chairs Atlas’s DEI committee. Before launching online courses in September 2020, Annie managed international trips for the company. Prior to joining Atlas Obscura, Annie was an associate director at Putney Student Travel, where she designed high school and middle school summer programs in Europe and the U.S.; led trips for high school students in Ireland, Czechia, and Italy for Putney and for National Geographic Student Expeditions; and worked with The New York Times to launch New York Times Student Journeys in 2016. She supervised programming and operations for the latter from 2016 to 2019. Before entering the field of experiential education and travel, Annie earned a master’s degree in creative writing from The University of Alabama where she taught English composition and creative writing to undergraduates, storytelling to high school students from Alabama’s Black Belt region, and creative writing at a medium-security prison. In 2013 she was awarded a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant to document nocturnal culture in the United States. Her writing and photographs have been published at The Rumpus and National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog. She lives in an off-grid yurt in Vermont with her partner and two dogs.
Stephanie Flor is a true tour de force, bringing vision and voice to the world of beauty—and not just beauty, but cultural, inspired, integral beauty that is restorative to women and to the planet. She is the founder of Around the World Beauty, a boutique travel company, where she guides women around the globe on exclusive beauty experiences to cultivate roots and celebrate the cultural source for modern day beauty rituals. Learn more at www.AroundTheWorldBeautyJourneys.com
Stephen Oddo is a serial travel industry entrepreneur and co-founded multiple companies in the tours & activities sector since 2005. He co-founded WalksofItaly.com, an online travel company for visitors to Italy offering sightseeing and VIP tours, in 2009. Walks has since launched tours in New York, Istanbul, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Athens, New Orleans, and San Francisco, rebranding as TakeWalks.com in 2018. Walks is now one of the largest wholly-owned operators of sightseeing tours in the world, handling hundreds of thousands of passengers annually, covering everything from walking tours, food & wine, day trips, and exclusive travel experiences.
Justine Abigail Yu (she/her) is an expert for Wanderful’s creator community as well as the head of Communications. She is also the Senior Advisor for RISE Travel Institute. Justine is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Living Hyphen, an emerging magazine that explores the experiences of living in between cultures as a hyphenated Canadian – that is, an individual who calls Canada home but who has roots elsewhere.
Her work has been featured on national and local media outlets including Yahoo! News, NextShark, CTV National News, and the CBC. Justine Abigail is a fierce advocate for equity and anti-oppression. Learn more at www.justineabigail.com.
March 19: How to Book Freelance Writing Gigs and Where to Find Them
Exclusively for Wanderful members
You’re a natural writer and have a great voice so why not leverage your talents as a freelance writer!
In this session with Leticia Barr, she will provide tips on how to leverage your blog and your contacts to get freelance writing gigs and how to negotiate budget and terms once there’s interest.
About Your Host: Leticia Barr founded her award-winning Tech Savvy Mama site based on personal and professional experience. Since 2008 she has combined her knowledge of child development, psychology, education, technology, and parenting to provide useful advice for families about the technology tools that have become a part of their lives. Her depth of knowledge about technology and education has allowed her to work with brands as a digital correspondent, spokesperson, and ambassador. Always a teacher at heart, Leticia often consults for brands, educating them about the social media space. She also enjoys mentoring fellow bloggers to help them achieve their professional goals and sharing her wisdom by speaking at conferences. Leticia is the 2018 Iris Award winner for Philanthropic Work of the Year for her work in Haiti since 2012 and enjoys the distinction of having been Parents Magazine’s Editors’ Pick for Best Tech Blog, Babble’s Top 100 Mom Blogs, one of the 50 Top Twitter Moms by Babble, and Mom.me’s 50 Favorite Mom Bloggers.
