TripSay blog

TripSay has been selected as one of the Red Herring 100 Europe finalists. The Red Herring editorial team selected the 2010 Finalists as the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. We’re both glad and proud that we made it to this list! Thanks to Red Herring for choosing us and organizing such a good event for start ups.

Our recently launched hotel search has been loved by early users. Some are even calling it the best hotel search on the net, at least if hotel location is important to you. We’ve decided to offer the same tool to our partners as well and the first partnership just went live with Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Nordic media company. We’re proud to now offer the hotel search as a part of their travel site targeted to Finnish travelers. It’s a co-branded partnership, where the community is run by Helsingin Sanomat, the hotel search is run by us and the actual hotels and booking is offered by Booking.com, one of the biggest hotel booking sites out there.

Our goal is find other such partners for our full service too. We believe that brands shouldn’t necessarily invest a lot of money into their own communities. They can rather outsource the service to a specialist like TripSay. We believe that this great partnership with Helsingin Sanomat is the first step toward that direction.

We just recently opened a new feature on the site to find and book hotels. You might think that hotel booking is nothing special but we believe that we’ve created a different and better way for you to book your hotel rooms. We got fed up with the way most sites force people to book hotels and thus wanted to create a better user experience.

The whole idea of the tool is that you can see and filter everything on a map.  In addition to the usual criteria (budget, stars, dates) you can choose the location of the hotel relative to the places you want to visit and see where the hotels and sights are located in a new city when doing the booking. No more do you need to switch from the long list of hotels to a small map showing you where the hotel is located but nothing else and then getting back to the long list and thus continue until you’ve found a proper hotel. Now you can see all the information you need in one view, filter it as you like, make your choice, read the reviews and complete the booking.

We’ve got Booking.com as our partner as they are one of the biggest hotel booking sites, have a good brand, good prices and good availability, all of which are important to anyone booking a hotel. In the future we aim to add other providers as well and other location related products like cars, tours, activities etc. Check it out yourself and let us know what you think!

In the latest build we added a few features we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. These are of course the digest emails and the possibility to follow other travelers.

Now if you decide to follow an interesting traveler you’ll get all their actions to your feed and digest emails so you won’t miss out on any new great tips or places they add.  Likewise the digest emails make sure that you’ll get a summary of the most interesting action on the site on a regular basis. This combined with the follow feature makes sure that you can now easily keep track of the newest and most interesting things added to the site. We hope that you find the features good and useful and as always we welcome feedback on them!

Nice headline don’t you think?

Well, there’s been quite a lot of buzz around the Dutch mobile startup Layar. We do also think that it is really cool and thus we created our own layer for people to use. If you haven’t seen a demo of Layar check out this video (or better yet, download our layer to your phone ). It is an “augmented reality” application enabling you to view content from various web services layered over the camera view of your phone. Thus you could just point your phone e.g. to a sight and read if people have liked it or not. We think it’s really cool!

If you have an iPhone or an Android phone you can download Layar to your phone and choose to use our layer (obviously named TripSay). It simply allows you to browse all our data with your phone as you walk the streets of any city. Just point your phone’s camera to any direction and see what places there are close by and what people say about them. Create a profile in TripSay, log in with your Layar and you’ll see places around you that are recommended to you by others sharing your taste.

This starts to be the kind of mobile travel application we’ve been wanting to create for a long time! Thanks to Layar it was quick to do too! Give it a try and let us know what you think about it!

We just made a new build of the service that we think adds a lot of cool stuff. Please let us know what you think about them! The short list of the biggest new features is here:

1. When you zoom in close enough on the map you’ll see all the places there are in e.g. a given city and by clicking “recommendations only” you can see only the places that match your profile. This is the view that has been our standard until today, but now you can choose between all the places and just the recommendations.
2. You can now rate all the places on the map and with each rating your profile is modified accordingly and your recommendations might change. It’s an easy and great way of finding new places!
3. You can now also add new places using the place’s address, not just dragging the marker around on the map.
4. You can now add places to your wish list. They along with everything else affect your profile and recommendations. Later on we’ll serve you with updates and new content on those places from the like-minded travelers.

There’s a bunch of other changes as well but especially points 1 and 2 we think are really cool and we’re glad they’re finally live on the site. Go and see for yourself!

I was yesterday one of the many presenters at a very interesting seminar on social media and service business with a special focus in travel. There were a lot of interesting presentations on how different social media services have been used in marketing. Quite many people thought that the term social media is pretty bad as the different services serve very different purposes. To prove the point there were many questions by the audience on the subject like “what are the first steps to get into social media” and “should you build your own platform or use existing ones” etc. Such questions can’t be answered before first understanding what the company wants to achieve as the means depend totally on the goals. Starting to tweet is different from founding a fan page in Facebook or using TripAdvisor to boost your visibility or building your own community site like Aurinkomatkat, a large Finnish tour operator, has done for their customers when they built Paikka auringossa (in Finnish only). Interesting fact about that site by the way is that the average age of  users is 52 years, more proof on the fact that people of all ages use social media.

In my presentation I referred to an interesting study by Beresford research regarding social networking sites and their users. That definitely is worth reading to anyone interested in how people use social media. The results were pretty surprising, e.g. users spent on average 22 hours per week in social networking sites and social networking was regarded as third most important activity after email and going out with friends, leaving behind things like sports and watching TV. A bit scary I think!

There were a lot of people asking for concrete results for using social media in marketing, concrete results here meaning money and ROI. As a sales guy I totally understand the need for ROI that but still in some ways I found that strange. The same people who don’t see the ROI in social media (what ever that means) don’t hesitate to spend money on TV, radio or print ads. Those, after all, are much harder to measure than something done on the web. Perhaps this is partly explained by the feeling that if you do a campaign on TV you believe that a lot of people will see that whereas if you do it on the web you can keep count exactly how many (or few) people joined your Facebook group or fan page or what ever. Personally I haven’t seen any TV ads in years and a small poll amoung friends confirmed the same. Due to digital TV people are skipping TV ads completely. The only “radio ad” I remember is “this is Jonathan from Spotify…”. I don’t register print ads at all. Perhaps advertisers find it easier to believe that TV/radio/print works because of the big potential reach rather than to actually run a campaign that can be measured showing that their message or service doesn’t actually interest very many people. I don’t know of course, that just a thought.

On the other hand there are many other ways of using social media than creating a Facebook fan page or starting to tweet. Creating a community or working with an existing community like TripSay can offer several benefits from SEO to better understanding and segmentation of your customers. Not to mention the most important thing which is to offer your customers a service they like. You have to think of your customers first. What is it that you can offer them that helps them or otherwise interests them. You have to think about what you can do with the information you collect that honestly benefits your customers and at the same time helps you to get to your goal, like increased sales. It’s definitely harder than just running a one size fits all mass media campaign and hoping someone will notice.

Our latest feature for the traveling folks is the Travel Taste tool. We’ve found the tool to be a lot of fun, and were happy to read the Travel Taste preview on the Los Angeles Times.

Travel Taste lets you compare your taste with friends and gives you ideas of places to go and – take careful note – places to avoid! The lists of places are personalized just for you. Under the hood, the feature basically taps the collective wisdom of traveling crowd. The list of recommendations is calculated in real time, based on the the user’s ratings in the context of “taste clusters“. The more places a user rates, the more accurate the resulting list will be. Works for us!

Seems that it worked for the time-honored L.A. Times as well. They write:

TripSay.com is a fun tool that lets you rate destinations around the world, then offers trip suggestions based on the places that like-minded travelers enjoyed.

Well said. The full story is here.

Travel Taste gets even more interesting when you compare your taste and ratings with your friends. There will be surprising likeness and disagreements! Try it out at TripSay!

I visited the Travel Distribution Summit organised by Eye for travel on the 19th and 20th of May. The summit was, again, an interesting show although this year I didn’t make it to any of the presentations. Instead I spent my whole time in the expo hall meeting with people. Some people said that it was a bit quieter than last year but I couldn’t really tell. To me it seemed pretty busy still and there were lots of good people to meet.

The funniest meeting was with Michael Burnham from Tripmedia. Although we didn’t know each other previously he spotted my badge and came to talk as he’d heard of our company before. We ended up chatting for quite a while and at some point ended up talking about how old we are as we don’t really get twitter. The funniest part was that he guessed that I’m much younger than I actually am and once I told him the truth he said that it must be my Dolph Lundgren like looks that made him guess wrong. I found that hilarious as some of the guys in the office have mentioned the same thing. It must be the blond hair…

I like the TDS concept where there’s an expo hall, some free presentations and the paid seminar. As I spent my time in the expo hall I saw that many interesting companies had a stand on the expo floor. This year, a promiment number of companies were offering mobile solutions for travel companies. Let’s see if mobile finally starts getting some traction as the consultants keep telling us in these seminars. Quite a lot of companies were offering web2.0 features to third parties (pretty much as we do with the widgets and the api). Good to see that there are others, who believe in the same model as we do! All in all it was nice to see that despite of the economy there still are companies coming up with new ideas and technologies.

The TDS is a good event and definitely worth going to. There were even some free drinks at the end of the show’s first day making it even better. You can’t go wrong with free drinks. Thanks for the guys at CarTrawler for serving me the drinks whenever I ran out!

We also had a get-together with a small bunch of travel startups on one of the evenings. It was good to meet others trying to do something new in travel with scarce resources. The whole thing was organised by the nice guys at Tourdust. I hope that we’ll have more such meetings in the future! It’s great to share experiences with other entrepreneurs in the same business. Looking forward to our future meetings!

You can plan a quiet family getaway to a cottage on a lake or plan a trip to El Salvador to throw fireballs at the annual balls of fire festival. Such is the beauty of travel, you can always discover a new experience. Checking out weird and wild festivals is one way to guarantee you have stories to tell when you get home. Here are a few festivals that have a couple of things in common; they are very popular and they lack common sense.

Visit Gloucestershire, England for the Cheese Rolling Festival on May 25^th. This annual event kicks off the wacky festival season. Contestants run down a very steep slope chasing a wheel-shaped Double Gloucester cheese. Most lose there footing at the top and roll down the hill head over heels risking injury for the first prize of a big roll of cheese.

July 1-14^th celebrate the 4^th of July (maybe for the last time) at the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. You might want to be a spectator at this event, 15 people have died and hundreds have been injured running with the bulls since it started in 1924.

In July Berlin is home to the Wasserschlacht Battle. Locals hurl eggs, food and water bombs at each other. The festival has been running for 11 years. It can get dangerous as people get carried away and rioting often ensues.

At the Balls of Fire Festival on August 31^st in Nejapa, El Salvador the locals honor a 1917 volcanic eruption by throwing fireballs (balls of cloth soaked in fuel) at each other in mini battles.

Sept 4^th and 5^th head to Prairie Du Sac, Wisconsin, for the 39^th annual Cow Chip Throw. Cow chip (AKA dried cow dung) throwing has grown to become the most anticipated event in town.