Skip to main content

Noken Delivers Custom, Hyper-Personalized Travel Guides Specific to You

Travel planning can be frustrating. Traditional, printed guidebooks feel almost “vintage” at this point. They require time-consuming research and leave you feeling overwhelmed with too much information and too little guidance. On the other hand, fully guided tours are too regimented and offer little independence for travelers looking to explore on their own. Noken is a new service that promises to split the difference with simple, custom itineraries hyper-personalized to your brand of travel.

According to Noken, the key is in the brand’s Travel Blueprints. These bespoke guides account for each travelers’ budget and timeline in order to book their experiences, accommodations, and in-country transportation. The goal is to provide a well-rounded, culturally immersive trip that includes a destination’s most iconic sights and off-the-beaten-path experiences. Because they’ve done all the research, Noken’s itineraries show you only the things you’re most interested in while providing the flexibility to go off-script once you’re in-country.

Related Videos
shinjuku tokyo japan

Travelers start by browsing Noken’s country guides for inspiration, then plug in their travel dates and interests. The service builds a custom itinerary that optimizes daily routes and key activities while promising plenty of free time for independent exploration. Once travelers confirm the details, Noken delivers the completed itinerary including everything but the flights (curiously, this is the only thing Noken does not handle). The itinerary features an hour-by-hour breakdown, GPS coordinates, inter-experience routes, and proprietary descriptions of each sight. Travelers can also chat directly with the Noken team, who can offer personalized trip assistance.

The real costs of a package trip are often a sort of “black box” where you have no idea how much you’re paying for each part of the package. Noken offers more transparency with an itemized, e-commerce-style breakdown that reveals the cost for each part of your journey. In the end, travelers pay no additional overhead for the travel portion of their journey. Instead, Noken earns commissions from their travel partners and charges a nominal $5 daily fee (per person) for access to the Experience Team during each trip.

The service is currently only available in Iceland, Japan, and Portugal. However, it just launched in October 2018 and already has the financial backing to expand to dozens of additional destinations in the coming months. The Noken mobile app is available free for Android and iOS and works offline to save on data roaming.

Editors' Recommendations

In 2021, More Men Are Flying Private than Ever Before
xo private jet survey aircraft

Look out, John Kerry: Personal jets are no longer for the uber elite. On Monday, April 21, XO, a worldwide private flight charter company, announced eye-popping growth over the last year and through 2021's first quarter. Any way you slice the numbers, more guys are flying private than ever before.

"Our success is directly related to XO’s enhanced digital marketplace, its unrivaled on-demand flight accessibility, and innovative crowd-sourcing technology that offers clients the ability to browse and book flights within seconds," said Rajat Khurana, Chief Commercial Officer of XO, in the release.
Related Guides

Read more
The Best Places to Book Travel and Vacation Rentals in 2022
Best Places to Book Travel and Vacation Rentals

After the better part of a year in pandemic lockdown, most of us are itching for an escape. While many hotels are doing their best to make hotel stays safe for their guests, the only way to stay 100% safe right now is not to comingle with strangers in confined spaces. The next best option is to book a vacation rental, homestay, or B&B getaway where the only guests are likely to be you and those closest to you. These are the best vacation rental sites for anyone looking for a fun, safe getaway in 2022.
Airbnb
As the granddaddy of peer-to-peer vacation rentals, Airbnb needs no introduction. Still, no roundup like this would be complete without mentioning it. The site has the world’s most extensive collection of vacation rentals, from barebones campsites to tiny cottage rentals to luxury beachfront villas. Airbnb’s search feature is top-notch, making it easy to drill down by location, price, amenities, pet-friendliness, and more. It’s so good, in fact, that almost every competitor rental site is trying hard to copy it.

What We Like: What we love most are the unique stay opportunities. These include everything from treehouses and teepees to mountaintop yurts and even igloos. If you’re looking for way-outside-the-box stays, you can even spend the night in a giant Idaho potato, a retro Scottish “submarine,” or a shipping container home in the woods.

Read more
Japan Considers Subsidizing Travelers’ Vacation Expenses
Tokyo Japan

As economies around the world spiral into a freefall, it seems no industry has been harder hit than travel. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of foreign visitors to some countries dropped to near-zero. Japan is one such destination, and now the country is considering a radical plan to bolster tourism by essentially paying international travelers to visit.

The Japan Tourism Agency recently announced the “Go To Travel” initiative. It’s designed to subsidize the leisure trips of tourists by paying up to 20,000 yen (approximately USD $185) per day for the duration of their stay. The goal is to cover roughly half of each trip through a combination of vouchers and discounts at restaurants, shops, entertainment venues, and hotels throughout the country. The program will be available to domestic and, once the country reopens its borders, international travelers.

Read more