TripAdvisor already has more than 100 million reviews on its sites, but it needs even more in order to continue competing against rivals like Yelp and Foursquare. Review Express, a service the travel Web site launched today, is meant to help TripAdvisor grow its roster of reviews by making it easy for venues to request them from customers. → Read More
TripAdvisor, the travel site built around destination guides and user reviews, today made another acquisition: it has bought Tiny Post, an iOS app that lets users take pictures, write captions over them, and then share them with people on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks like this was both an acqui-hire as well as a product acquisition. The… → Read More
Locu, a local business data provider which extracts structured data from business websites and then makes it available via an API, is today announcing two major new partnerships, specifically for its restaurant data: CitySearch and TripAdvisor. The news comes only a couple of months after OpenTable signed with Locu on a similar deal. → Read More
TripAdvisor, a site that offers free guides and reviews for various traveling adventures, has just acquired Wanderfly.
TripAdvisor has been slowly but surely integrating more social layers to its platform, with Friend of Friend reviews and a Local Picks Facebook app for restaurants. But the company’s acquisition of Wanderfly is taking that social integration to the next level. → Read More
Tourists rave about a city’s well-known restaurants and distort their review averages. So today travel site TripAdvisor starts highlighting beloved eateries from people who live nearby in Local Picks, a Facebook app it’s relaunching. Originally released in 2007 but shut down from 2010 until now, Local Picks pulls in reviews of 850,000 restaurants from TripAdvisor, re-sorts them to more heavily… → Read More
Paralysis can set in quickly when you’re faced with the infinitude of products and reviews on sprawling sites like Amazon or Yelp. To help you find your way, TripAdvisor has just begun showing reviews by Facebook friends of friends atop results. The site already featured tips from friends, but with 60 million reviews on the site, surfacing content from friends of friends (FoF) means you’re 10x… → Read More
On the heels of last week’s announcement of “social” hostel booking site InBed.me picking up a $1.2m seed round, another social travel site is launching today: Tripbirds, which lets users pick up travel recommendations from friends via other social networks, is now open for business after a private beta period that saw 4,000 sign-ups and 13 million check-ins and images collected.
At the same… → Read More
After spinning off from Expedia and debuting on the NASDAQ in December, trip reviews site TripAdvisor posted fourth quarter 2011 revenues of $137.8 million, a 30% increase over fourth quarter 2010. Full year 2011 revenues were $637.1 million, a 31% increase over full year 2010. Fourth quarter 2011 GAAP earnings per share ) was $0.16 per diluted share compared to $0.14 for the fourth quarter 2010. → Read More
In April, Expedia announced its intentions to spin off trip reviews site TripAdvisor as a public company. And this morning, TripAdvisor debuted on the NASDAQ under the symbol ‘TRIP’ trading at. This morning, TripAdvisor is trading at $29. Expedia is trading at $27.72, down 50 percent.
TripAdvisor, which was founded in 2000, was originally bought by IAC in for $212 million in 2004. IAC spun off… → Read More
Travel search and booking giant Expedia, which is traded on the Nasdaq under ‘EXPE,’ is spinning off trip reviews site TripAdvisor as a public company. In a release, Expedia said that its Board of Directors has preliminarily approved the plan to separate Expedia into two publicly traded companies.
Expedia/IAC must feel that spinning off TripAdvisor as a public company could be a financially… → Read More
TripAdvisor, the Expedia-owned travel site, this morning announced it has boosted its mobile travel offering with the acquisition of EveryTrail. The latter, actually a service from GlobalMotion Media, is a GPS-enabled publishing platform that lets people create outdoor walking tours, hiking trails and city guides for mobile devices. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
Hot on the heels of bringing Instant Personalization to Clicker last week, today Facebook is announcing the latest addition to the program: TripAdvisor. The popular travel site, which includes user reviews of hotels, restaurants, and other venues along with tools for booking a trip, will use your Facebook data to more prominently feature friends’ reviews. You’ll also be able to see where your… → Read More
So, LeWeb ’10 is coming up. Let’s say you’re looking for some good ideas of where to stay and what to do in Paris while you’re there. Where are you most likely to turn on the web? Google. A search for “paris vacation” yields TripAdvisor as the top result. You click on that link.
Oh. My. God. → Read More
Travel website operator TripAdvisor, an Expedia company, this morning announced it has acquired Holiday Lettings, credited as being the UK’s largest independent vacation rental website.
The seller is Rightmove, a UK-based property website operator, having sold its majority interest in the holding company of Holiday Lettings to TripAdvisor for an undisclosed sum. Rightmove acquired a 66.67% stake… → Read More
Travel website operator TripAdvisor, an Expedia company, this morning announced it has acquired Holiday Lettings, credited as being the UK’s largest independent vacation rental website.
The seller is Rightmove, a UK-based property website operator, having sold its majority interest in the holding company of Holiday Lettings to TripAdvisor for an undisclosed sum. Rightmove acquired a 66.67% stake… → Read More
Online travel services group Expedia has reported its results for Q2 2009, and the financials aren’t looking spectacular, but they are not as bad as expected.
Although the number of booking transactions handled by the company actually saw a small uptick, gross bookings decreased 5%. As a result, revenues went down 3% (from $795 million in 2008 to $770 million) and operating income decreased a… → Read More
There are two different types of hotel reviews: user reviews and professional reviews from travel journalists. When choosing a hotel, it can be helpful to evaluate both. TripAdvisor has long been the leader of the pack when it comes to providing a database of user reviews for every hotel out there. Oyster Hotel Reviews aims to provide consumers with qualified professional reviews of hotels around… → Read More
Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.
The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten… → Read More
NileGuide, a one-stop travel planning site, is rolling out several new features to its travel booking and planning portal. You can see our original review of the site here. NileGuide has re-designed the site with a sleek interface, a few more bells and whistles, added more geographic coverage areas, and created several trip planning tools to enhance the planning process.
The layout and general… → Read More
Airline group Air France-KLM, formed after the merger of Société Air France and the Royal Dutch Airlines and currently the largest airline company in the world in terms of operating revenues, has recently launched a social network for travelers called Bluenity to connect its +75 million customers when traveling (presumably so that they can meet up with strangers).
An airline moving into social… → Read More
TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S. → Read More
Later today VibeAgent, a site that lets users find, rate and review hotels, will be announcing their site is out of beta at the PhoCusWright travel conference in Orlando. We previously covered VibeAgent during their private beta and handed out some invites on Inviteshare. The easiest way to describe the site is as a more social TripAdvisor, which the company clearly wants to take down. Currently… → Read More
Update: We have now confirmed that this deal has not happened and is in the discussion stage only. Inside Facebook pulled the trigger on their post a little too soon. TripAdvisor has acquired Facebook Application “Where I’ve Been” for a reported $3 million. Where I’ve Been allows users to share where they have been in the world from their Facebook profiles and has approximately… → Read More
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