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Trippy launches, aims to transform travel planning into a social experience
When it comes to travel planning, your friends are the best source of information. Such is the motto of just-launched social networking site for travel planning, Trippy.Using a simple integration with Facebook, members can create trip planning templates with the click of a button. Fill in just a few details and the site will auto-populate suggestions for hotels, activities, and restaurants, plus provide a comprehensive list of your Facebook friends who are from, live or lived in, have visited or went to school in the destination. Then, using a personalized trip link, you can privately message friends to ask for suggestions about your upcoming trip.
As you piece together parts of your vacation, Trippy helps organize the information into an itinerary that can be sent via iPhone app or email. While you're traveling, you can easily snap a photo with your smartphone and send pictures to the friends who helped you plan. The itinerary is also easily saved, so other friends who use the site can copy your travel plans at a later date.
If you don't have friends in a certain spot, the site's handy auto-complete feature pulls in data from Factual.com, Google Places and the site's own internal database. More features will be added soon.
Entrepreneur J.R. Johnson is behind the site. Once the brains behind VirtualTourist and OneTime.com (sold in 2008 to Expedia), Johnson aims to develop a new kind of traveling model. "There's too much user generated content out there now," Johnson said. Trippy is based on the principle that the best information is "friendsourced" rather than "crowdsourced."
It's becoming more and more difficult to rely on sites that don't vet reviews, Johnson said. One never knows if the reviews are posted by paid travelers or the properties themselves. With Trippy, travelers will know that the information they're getting is from a trustworthy source - their friends.
Trips can be planned for real, upcoming stays, or for a "dream" vacation. This process, Johnson says, helps travelers make the leap from dream to reality - the site soon showcase easy booking integration with sites like Expedia, where users can check rates and book right within Trippy.
We played with the site for an upcoming visit to Chicago and found it easy to use. We were able to reach out to several friends we didn't even know were in or from the area and added a few great suggestions to our upcoming itinerary. A few kinks are still being worked out, as in any beta version, and integration with sites like Twitter and Foursquare is soon coming. We look forward to testing the iPhone integration in a few weeks, but the free app is available for download now.
Gadling readers get early access to the beta site with code GADLING.
Entrepreneur J.R. Johnson is behind the site. Once the brains behind VirtualTourist and OneTime.com (sold in 2008 to Expedia), Johnson aims to develop a new kind of traveling model. "There's too much user generated content out there now," Johnson said. Trippy is based on the principle that the best information is "friendsourced" rather than "crowdsourced."
It's becoming more and more difficult to rely on sites that don't vet reviews, Johnson said. One never knows if the reviews are posted by paid travelers or the properties themselves. With Trippy, travelers will know that the information they're getting is from a trustworthy source - their friends.
Trips can be planned for real, upcoming stays, or for a "dream" vacation. This process, Johnson says, helps travelers make the leap from dream to reality - the site soon showcase easy booking integration with sites like Expedia, where users can check rates and book right within Trippy.
We played with the site for an upcoming visit to Chicago and found it easy to use. We were able to reach out to several friends we didn't even know were in or from the area and added a few great suggestions to our upcoming itinerary. A few kinks are still being worked out, as in any beta version, and integration with sites like Twitter and Foursquare is soon coming. We look forward to testing the iPhone integration in a few weeks, but the free app is available for download now.
Gadling readers get early access to the beta site with code GADLING.
Filed under: Internet Tools
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Anshuman Bapna Sep 20th 2011 8:39AM
Trippy is a great new entry towards solving the "paradox of choice" you face when you're planning your trip using just the web, so more power to them.
I would argue though that there's a reason why travel planning hasn't been elegantly solved after more than a decade of online innovation.
If you step back, you'll hear arguments that the web has seen a few major shifts in the past 10 years, and a winner emerges for every one of them eventually. These were disintermediation (winner: Expedia), UGC (winner: Tripadvisor), local (?), social (?). Since we don't have winners for the last two, one will emerge. QED.
The challenge with social in travel is the sparseness problem - the experience is a ghost town until a critical mass of your friends show up. What's more, social travel sites (Gogobot etc) at best solve only the opinions part of travel planning ("what should i do"), not the logistical one ("find me good car rental deals", "where should I rent gear", "opening hours of museum", "hour-by-hour itinerary"). And as any traveler would attest, *that* is the kind of travel planning stuff that kills you.
Tooting our own horn - I run mygola.com, a travel planning startup where you can get someone else to do all the tedious research for your trip. For me, it was important that the core experience works well for all travelers from Day 1 - you can ask any travel question and are guaranteed to get a detailed, personalized answer in a predictable time and with zero effort on your part. Users love it (twitter.com/ohmygola/favorites)
There's still social & local - we tell you which friends might know about your destination (a la Trippy) and we also ask locals on twitter to opine on what's awesome. These are critical features, but they remain the trunk and the ears, not the elephant itself.