New Site Brings Travelers and Shoppers Together

There's a 95 percent chance Senior Editor Christine Sarkis is thinking about travel right now. Follow her on Instagram @postcartography and Twitter @ChristineSarkis.

Christine Sarkis is an SATW-award-winning journalist and executive editor at SmarterTravel. Her stories have also appeared on USA Today, Conde Nast Traveler, Huffington Post, and Business Insider. Her advice has been featured in dozens of print and online publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and People magazine. She has also shared travel tips on television and radio shows including Good Morning America, Marketplace, and Here & Now. Her work has been published in the anthologies Spain from a Backpack and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. She is currently working on a travel memoir.

The Handy Item I Always Pack: The Trtl Pillow. It's easy to pack and comfortable, and makes it so I can actually sleep on flights.

Ultimate Bucket List Experience: Seeing the Aurora Borealis from the comfort of somewhere warm, like a glass igloo or hot spring.

Travel Motto: Curiosity is an amazing compass.

Aisle, Window, or Middle Seat: Aisle all the way.

Email Christine Sarkis at editor@smartertravel.com.

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Peer-to-peer power comes to travel with the new website Grabr. When I first heard about it—a site whose aim was to unite people who wanted (legal) items from a specific destination delivered to them in their home country—I was intrigued. After stints living in both London and Paris, there are certain things (mostly foods) that I would love to have again, and this seems like a program tailor-made to just this sort of small-world travel nostalgia.

Here’s how it works: Shoppers submit requests for items, along with the price of whatever it is they seek and their proposed reward dollar amount. So for instance, when I looked, Dan from Ho Chi Minh City was willing to reward someone $14 to bring him a Vitamix container; while Jewel from Wellington, New Zealand, wanted someone to bring her a pair of Sperry Top Siders from the U.S.

If you decide to be the delivering traveler, you can negotiate the reward cost, and then Grabr takes over, brokering the payment and adding a 7 percent fee to the shopper.

As a shopper, it’s an easy way to get things you simply can’t get where you are. As a traveler, it offers an easy way to earn a little extra money and gives you the opportunity to meet a local. When I spoke to founders Daria Rebenok and Artem Fedyaev, they said shoppers would generally go out of their way to make it easy for the traveler to do the drop-off, and that sometimes shoppers and travelers ended up hanging out.

How about you? Would you deliver?

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(Photo: Grabr)

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