Every traveler has been there. Your flights and hotels are booked…finally. But now you’re facing a glaring hole staring back at you: working to fill the currently empty void of what to do when you arrive. Enter Peek.com, a one stop shop operating in 15 cities across the United States, and just recently in London and Paris, whose fresh activities booking platform makes it easy for travellers to find and book interesting things to do in each city. Think less the hotel concierge staff and more of that super cool, wanderlust, itchy feet best friend who is constantly on the move, and more than happy to share their crazy experiences.

This is where peek.com founder Ruzwana Bashir – whose most recent memorable experiences include horseback riding in Mongolia, “our guide invited us back to eat dinner with his family,” recounted Bashir excitedly, a helicopter tour in Hawaii where “the water is so clear you could see the stingrays at the bottom” – says her idea for peek came into play when ” I was planning a trip to Istanbul and ended up spending 20 hours online researching all the amazing things to do there and trying to organize how to book them… the whole process was really challenging and I thought why isn’t there a one-stop shop to book and buy?”

Bashir had become the go-to source of information amongst her friends; a frequent traveller, she had created individual documents of tips and advice for each different location to pass along, “and I quickly realized that was not the most efficient way to give out that information.” She and her team are quickly finding that ‘most efficient way’. Peek is beautifully laid out, fun to browse through – window shopping for diving with sharks anyone? – and is a site made for and with an ethos to create savvy travellers, making destination suggestions easy to come by.

It is the proverbial spring for travel sites. They are popping up all over the web – an industry expected to grow significantly in the coming years; across e-commerce and mobile commerce platforms, and with social media playing an increasingly important role in consumer research. The Wall Street Journal, citing reportlinker.com’s recent Business to Consumer e-market trends, predicts that e-commerce will grow at double digit rates at least until 2015, with travel leading the market. See the article here. Peek.com helps to cut through that clutter.

And this is what separates Peek from the herd: a social component combining the best of everything we love from the web; honest reviews; networking; idea hunting; celebrity guidance; and an easy booking system.

Their Tastemaker Perfect days are released with new locations and feature influencers, such as Diane Von Furstenberg and Wolfgang Puck, who take readers on a tour what to do in their favourite cities, “We’re giving you an insight, or a Peek, into the perfect travel experience[…] we’re giving people a different lens with which to look at a particular place.” And this platform extends far beyond the ‘tastemakers’. With personalized profiles and the ability to create your own ‘Perfect Day’, users of the site can share their own favourite experiences. Breaking it down for me, Bashir gets excited with what seems to be the real innovation and driving force behind the site, a centralization of the constant stream of word of mouth, sought out travel tips and unsolicited advice you pass on to your friends, “you create a perfect day and it lives on your profile[… ]with your perfect day you have much more colour, have beautiful photographs, they can learn more. This is the premise around how we can take these emails you send to your friends and make them into something that live in one place.”

When asked if she would classify this as ‘travel e-commerce’ however, Bashir is quick to make the distinction, she describes Peek as playful and beautiful with a community of storytellers, not simply commerce. “Changes in the web have made it possible to provide a much richer user experience, it enables incredible storytelling, it’s about being able to tell the story and epic experience and help you understand what being there in that moment would be like. The more we can do that, the more you learn that it is an experience you want to do.”