Extravigator is about replicating the kinds of conversations you have — when you’re among friends — on the best places to travel. It’s been our experience that some of the finest travel experiences could never have been found in a guide book or by looking through user-driven popularity rankings. It’s the informal discussions you have about where to go and where to stay (and where not the stay) that allow us to find the information that’s individually important to each and every one of us. It’s the questions and tailored answers we exchange with one another that give us insight into miniscule details and insider knowledge that is essential to travelers who invest dearly in their vacations and their time off. These types of discoveries and exchanges can never be replicated without unadulterated dialogue among travelers. Extravigator hopes to provide a place where travelers can have this kind of exchange.

What’s where?

Good conversations will only take you so far. We want our users to be able to find what’s been said about anything and anyplace at any time. Keeping that in mind we’ve organized our discussions differently from your typical travel forum.

Extravigator discussions are organized by topic, not sequestered by their geographic location. We feel that assigning discussions into region-based folders is limiting and essentially hides important conversations from those who are actively looking at other locations. More often than not, an individual who’s already been to Australia, but planning on visiting Paris, won’t be browsing discussions on Australia. Sequestering may make it easier to focus your browsing, but it also makes it more difficult to have more natural and useful conversations with a wide range of participants.

So, we’ve organized our discussions into topics — like hotels, spas, restaurants, museums, and so on — to make it easier to exchange dialogue with others no matter what regions of the world are being discussed.

In order to make geographic sense of this seemingly radical organizational style, editors will tag the most useful discussions with region and city tags to make them easily searchable and sortable for those who want to read what others have said about a particular place.

We’ve also taken it a step further with our advanced URL structure. If you want to find all of the comments on Extravigator about villas on the Amalfi Coast, it’s as easy as making your own unique URLs:

http://extravigator.com/comments/amalfi+villas

You can bookmark the resulting page, or you can even subscribe to that page’s unique RSS feed and you’ll be alerted whenever a new comment appears with those words.

In the coming weeks you’ll hear more about the ways we plan to make Extravigator one of the best places to talk about travel on the web.