Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based… → Read More
Pintrips, a new personal travel planning startup, is today publicly entering the competitive, crowded travel space with the public debut of its online pinboard for tracking flights and prices. The service operates differently from the typical price comparison engines and aggregators, as its focus isn’t only on finding the best prices and schedules – it’s about being able to compare different… → Read More
Have you ever planned a vacation and remembered that you once saw a photo of a great dish on Facebook? If only you could remember who posted it and when. A new service, Roam7, has launched that promises to reach deep into your social networks to pull that information for you.
The service combs your friends’ Facebook albums and assembles relevant photos into a page to help you figure out… → Read More
Since launching in 2010, social travel startup Gogobot has been trying to play a role in legitimizing online travel discovery, fighting the shoddy design and link farm leanings that reined in the space. Focusing on collecting and curating quality, user-generated photos and reviews for travel destinations all over the world, Gogobot set out to create the new, digital Lonely Planet — a trusted… → Read More
Over the last few years, the travel industry has begun to undergo significant change, as startups and incumbents have fought to bring the disparate parts of a highly regulated industry online. Much of the attention from consumer web businesses has focused on making travel more “social,” improving discovery and helping travelers figure out what to do at destinations of choice. Today, there’s a… → Read More
Since launching in November 2010, social travel startup Gogobot has been on a mission to remove the shoddy design and link farm tendencies from the old world of online travel discovery. Because travel research should be a visual experience, from the get-go Gogobot focused on collecting and curating quality photos from the world’s many travel destinations. → Read More
While the online (and social) travel space has been contracting a bit after last year’s barrage of new entrants, one of the few young companies that has been able to maintain not only a strong foothold but continuing growth has been social trip planner, Gogobot. Jumping from one million registered users in May to its current 2.5 million+ (and seeing 800 percent growth in its user base in 2012)… → Read More
When I interviewed Tripbirds co-founder Ted Valentin before the social travel recommendation site’s launch in March, he told me that hotel bookings formed the core of Tripbirds’ revenue-generation model. “If we can nail hotel recommendations, you don’t have to do more to have a valuable business,” he said. Now, Tripbirds is taking this idea to heart: the social travel network is from today… → Read More
Social travel site Gogobot has been on a roll lately. Just two months ago, the company announced that it had passed 1 million registered users. Today, Gogobot announced that it now has more than 2 million users, up 100% in the past 60 days. Currently a new users signs up for the service every 15 seconds. To celebrate this milestone, the company also today announced its completely redesigned iPhone… → Read More
Jetpac, a gorgeous social travel application for iPad, has just scored $2.4 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures, Morado Venture Partners, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and [redacted], a top Facebook exec. (Sorry, they won’t let us say). The company first debuted its iPad app in April of this year, which lets you browse and favorite travel photos taken by your friends on Facebook. → Read More
Anything that helps hotels improve their customer service levels is welcome in my book. Tools to help them upsell, not quite so much.
To that end, LoungeUp, a startup that provides a platform to enable hotels to jump on the mobile app bandwagon, has announced that it’s raised a seed round of “several hundred thousand euros” from Pôle Capital and several Angels, including Nicolas Baudy… → Read More
Gogobot, the social travel site that recently passed the 1 million registered user mark, just launched an interesting redesign this week that turn the site’s homepage into more of an interactive magazine experience with a focus on photos instead of the site’s previous text-heavy design. As Gogobot’s founder Travis Katz told me earlier this week, the Gogobot team noticed that its users didn’t just… → Read More
Trippy a social travel planner for web and mobile (and former TechCrunch Disrupt participant) is launching its first iPad application today to complement its current iPhone-only offering. The app, like many focused on content discovery, looks much more amazing on the iPad, where you can browse big, beautiful photos of places you want to go. You can see the photos laid out in the now-popular… → Read More
We’ve been covering Gogobot since it first launched in early 2010. It took the social travel discovery and advice site a little while to find its niche, but since about the middle of 2011, it’s been adding new members rapidly. Today, Gogobot is announcing that it has now surpassed the 1 million registered user mark. According to the company’s own data, a new member is signing up for service every… → Read More
Social travel site Gogobot is doing a little traveling of its own. Today, it’s announcing the opening of its first European headquarters, in London.
The move, says Travis Katz, the CEO and founder of the company, is being done to capitalize on the fact that the site already has nearly as many users in Europe as it does in the rest of the world: some 44 percent of people who have linked into… → Read More
As Semil showed back in November, social travel sites are all the rage these days among the entrepreneurs, offering plenty of interesting approaches to offering recommendations on where and how to travel. You may not have heard of HipGeo, but if you’re a traveler, this is something that will likely pique your curiosity. HipGeo has developed a location-aware platform that records and displays the… → Read More
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