Review of Travelistic

To quote their FAQ page, Travelistic “is a site that lets you explore the world through video.” Travel videos range from those uploaded by ordinary users to professionally produced clips to tourist board videos. Begun in October 2006, Travelistic comes from Diversion Media, a cutting edge media company founded by MTV, VH1, and SonicNet vet Nick Butterworth.

Travelistic contains an impressive array of options. Its thousands of free travel videos are searchable by location on a Google world map, by most popular producers, or by popular tags. There’s also a frequently updated Travleistic blog for those who’d rather read than see and hear travel information. The videos themselves are varied in tone and style: the eternally bikinied Get Out girls (unsurprisingly the site’s most popular tour guides) offer Wild On!-esque eye candy from hotspots like Jamaica to Hawaii; BCPictures create short, briefly informative segments with airline stewardess voiceovers explaining the perks of Holland hostels and the religious sites of Peru; and unlike most others, The Map

, hosted by Liza de Guia, is an original Travelistic program a youth-oriented series featuring everything from an ultramarathon in the Sahara to a recap of Carnival celebrations across the globe. With such a wide selection of series and video’d locales, it’s difficult to not find what you’re looking for.

You’re probably still stuck on the Get Out girls, but Kelly Loudenberg is just as pretty and has a more DIY field reporting approach to showing Travelistic users eccentric and out of the ordinary spots, as in an episode about an artistic community in the middle of Texas or the one giving a New York City lesson in the culture jamming activity known as shopdropping. Loudenberg’s take is more political, and her videos’ ethereal music and focus on the otherworldly make for pleasantly atmospheric viewing.