TripSay blog

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.

When Moms think about Mothers Day they look forward to the old standbys – flowers, chocolates and brunch or dinner with their kids. While these are all special and heartfelt let’s face it Moms deserve even more. So we thought we would plant the seed and list some of the favorite dream travel destinations for Moms, just a subtle hint for Mothers Day gift ideas for next year.

Here are some of the top travel destination and activity ideas for Moms who deserve nothing but the best, courtesy of Shermans Travel:

• Art Viewing in Florence, Italy
• Shopping in New York
• Spa and Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona
• Theatre in London
• Wine sipping in Sonoma, California
• Yoga in Costa Rica
• And of course we can’t forget a girls getaway to Las Vegas!

Remember not to ask Mom what happened on the getaway when she returns… what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!

I was in the Travolution Summit in London last week. An interesting day full of interesting presentations. Also the weather in London was fantastic - no, really!

The most interesting session was about user experience where both Google and Frommer’s had done a lot of interesting research. The Frommer’s study pointed out that the weakest link online today are recommendations both on the destination itself and the activities/things to do in the destinations before choosing where to go. According to Frommer’s that’s what consumers want but feel are not getting from travel agents or the web today. This is great news for us as recommendations are exactly what we are doing – trying to help our members to get new ideas and tips on the places they find or might find interesting answering the questions “Should I go there? If so what are the most interesting places for me to see?”.

There a lot of coverage from the event on the Travolution site. See especially the Frommer’s study. Interesting stuff.

I participated the panel discussion regarding innovations in online travel. The session focused on HomeAway that has been hugely successful in a relatively short period of time. The discussion was over too soon and I would have loved to hear more about how they made it and what we other startups can learn from their experiences. There’s only so much time in a conference like this, unfortunately.

Thanks for the Travolution guys for inviting me over! I look forward to the next time.

How would you like to have six weeks of vacation each year? Well unless you get hit with six weeks of unpaid furlough days the chances of getting more than a few weeks off in the U.S. are slim to none.

The Danes are the lucky ones who lead the pack of generous paid vacation recipients. According to a ‘Hewitt Associates’ study Denmark workers average 31 days vacation, followed closely by Austria and Finland at 30 days. Americans, Canadians and Japanese average 10 vacation days a year. Mexicans are at the bottom of the list with only 6 days a year to enjoy the beautiful beaches in their country.

Remarkably 20 percent of Americans don’t use all of their vacation days, so either Americans love their jobs or they just aren’t as well versed at relaxing and enjoying long stretches away from the office as Europeans.

This leads us to the big European May 1st holiday or “May Day” that many Americans know little about. While the Americans head to work on May 1st the party has been going all night in many European countries. One tradition surrounding May Day is Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht) is a holiday celebrated on April 30th or May 1st across Central and Northern Europe.

Historically Walpurgisnacht comes from various pagan spring customs. Bonfires were built to keep away bad spirits. This is followed by the return of light and the sun as celebrated during May Day. May 1st is also a big day for the European labor movement in many countries and it’s a great excuse for a party.

The bottom line is the May 1st holiday is “just another day AWAY from the office”. For Americans the expression is “just another day AT the office”. Fair, huh?

“Happy 1st of May!” or “Hauskaa Wappua, Glada Vappen!“, as we say in Finland.