Vacations Blog

I had a chance to meet with the Juha Huttunen and Leo Koivulehto when they came to the April Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I was especially excited because they were from Finland. American competitiveness in the post-American world depends on our ability to attract foreign entrepreneurs like Juha and Leo to build successful businesses in the U.S. and/or targeting the U.S. market. So I’m excited about the progress they have made with TripSay .

We also shared our passion for travel and the different and complementary strategies that UpTake and TripSay are taking. At UpTake, we are a travel search solution focused on aggregating word-of-mouth across all travel communities out there, including TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and TripSay. TripSay, on the other hand, is pioneering social travel tools to enable you to get filtered tips and recommendations from a network of passionate travelers and your friends.

TripSay is just getting started. Be forwarned that social travel “is about the people” so TripSay feels like a bar or club where you’ve arrived about an hour before the rest of the crowd is coming. So it will feel more full of life once more people sign up.

TripSay Groups is a nice way to get started if you don’t have many friends

The issue with new social sites is building up your network from your existing friend base or connecting with people with similar interests. Groups are a great way to get started if your friends haven’t adopted TripSay yet.

Examples of Groups

I joined the hiking, beachbums, and New York City groups.

Tips from the Group

Within the group, people can offer tips. You can also add tips to destinations and things to do when you add them to your profile. For interest-based groups, the tips are pretty spread out across geography. But for a destination specific group, like New York City, there is the potential for group members to share tips with each other with a focus on that destination.

Group News Feed

You can also see a group “news feed” that highlights what the group members are doing within the TripSay site. This is very Facebook-like in seeing what other people are doing. As people build relationships with other group members

Group Message Board

Groups also have a new message board where people can share ideas and ask questions.

Maps-Based Approach is Great for Discovery

TripSay also has a nice maps based approach that allows you to find other points of interest or destinations. Its graphically interesting and complementary to the search-based approach that we have taken. It is somewhat reminiscent of TripAdvisor’s well hidden map-view of products, but more community-driven, or new entrant PlanetEye .

Other Social Travel Sites

I confess I haven’t spent as much time looking at other Social Travel sites other than TripSay. But here is a list of some others that might have different strengths and good ideas.

• WAYN - Largest, most succesful social network for search
• TravBuddy - Well established travel social network with forums, blogs, community.
• Dopplr - social network of frequent travelers, share upcoming itineraries and trips
• RealTravel - travel blogging platform
• Tripwiser - focusing on road trips, people create itineraries, sort of like Yahoo Travel! Planner
• Tripwolf - New travel social network that just announced 10,000 users.
• YowTRIP - looking for investment; finding travel partners; experts, groups, good tips and good travel companions.
• Hereorthere - travel blogging site with community comments
• Driftr - photo oriented sharing site, create your itinerary, share phtos, tag items. Sort of like real Travel and yahoo! Planner
• TripTie - remixing travel itineraries. users share trip itneraries and then you can use that to create your own

Congrats again to TripSay! We wish them success in this new phase of their company!

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