Stockholm-based Tripbirds, a start-up focused on enabling users to make their travel plans with the help of their friends, is planning to launch in the near future.
Tripbirds founders include Ted Valentin (Swedish serial entrepreneur, founder of 24hbc.com), Robert Kajic (a phd student in database technology) and Jonatan Heyman (ESN, the company that developed Battlelog). In all, the company has seven members in its team.
The company points out that it is building a “social travel site based on Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Instagram”.
“Essentially we want to make it easier to get travel recommendations from your friends. So, for example if you’re going to Paris you can use Tripbirds to see which of your friends that have been there, what places they’ve visited and find/ask for recommendations,” says Tripbirds’ community manager Martina Elm.
“The social travel scene is pretty crowded right now, so it makes the situation exciting. The most thrilling part about it is that no one has really nailed it yet, we have interesting times ahead of us. And even though we of course keep track of everything happening around us, our only focus right now is to build the best travel site there can be,” Elm told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta.
Elm, who says the business model is based on hotel bookings, spoke about the venture:
-On the progress made by the online travel industry in 2011:
More and more social travel start-ups are popping up, and existing big review sites are adding, for example, Facebook integration etc. Travel planning is going social and this will shape the planning process.
-Tripbirds invites users and entices them to rediscover the world with a “little help” from
their friends.
On the timing of such venture from the travel industry’s perspective:
There’s a lot happening in social travel right now and there’s a big interest. We believe that the timing is appropriate. The gaps/problems we’re solving are these:
1. Bringing trust into travel recommendations:It’s hard to trust existing review sites like TripAdvisor. One growing problem is that hotel owners hire “review optimisation” companies to write fake reviews. Tripbirds is completely social, you’ll only get travel recommendations from your friends, meaning all recommendations will be reliable. Unlike traditional guide books like Lonely Planet, you don’t get the same recommendations as anyone else.
2. Making trip planning fun:Searching for information about travel destinations is a lonely and time consuming task. By making this process social, connecting with your friends, it becomes more fun and inspiring.
3. Saving it all in one place:A lot of people are asking for travel recommendations from friends on Facebook. This works pretty good. You usually get a bunch of good ones. But the problem is that this information is not being saved anywhere, and therefore identical questions are being asked over and over again. What we’re doing is saving all of your recommendations so that its easy and accessible.
-It is pointed out that the overlap between a prospective traveller’s social graph and the travel options in consideration set is actually pretty thin. On limitations of such ventures:
It's true that for a social recommendation service, by definition users will always be limited by their social graph. However, you don't need an enormous network to actually get quite good coverage of travel recommendations, and those recommendations will always be better than recommendations that aren’t from people you know and trust.
-On how consumers perceive content based on “friends or their connections” vis-à-vis content they read on OTAs/hotels/ review sites:
You can of course find great recommendations on a classic review site but the difference with the recommendations that you get from your friends are that you can know for a fact that the recommendations are reliable and that they’ve taken your personality and taste in consideration.
We definitely believe that people value this higher than a recommendation from a random person on the Internet.
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