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. Net income was $22 million, a 19% increase over fourth quarter 2010.

TripAdvisor, which was founded in 2000, was originally bought by IAC in for $212 million in 2004. IAC spun off Expedia, which included TripAdvisor, in 2005. With 50 million unique monthly visitors and 20 million members, TripAdvisor is the giant in the travel reviews space. The site publishes 25 new contributions every minute and also features over eight million candid traveler photos. The reviews site operates in 30 different countries, including in China under the site Daodao.

“The fourth quarter capped an exciting end to a great year for TripAdvisor, as we grew our valuable
user and content base, extended our platform and product offerings, and completed our spin-off from
Expedia”, said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. “In 2012 we expect to build upon our success and
continue to drive shareholder value making the necessary investments to accelerate growth and
profitability.”

As we’ve written in the past, TripAdvisor’s main revenue stream is cost-per-click advertising. Revenues from click-based advertising totaled $99.8 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 24% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Revenues from display-based advertising totaled $22.9 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

After notching a spot on the NASDAQ, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer carved out a few minutes for Founder Stories, with host, Chris Dixon. In episode II of this interview, the two discuss their mutual disdain for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Kaufer offers advice to founders.

Highlighting a piece of advice, Kaufer tells Dixon a good way for “a consumer facing, web-based business” to capture what “your visitors really want” is to run a live test with a non-working link. Calling these “404-tests” he says “before you build the darn thing … see how many people click it. It goes nowhere, it says broken link to the user [but] your log file says how many people” checked it out.

While the marketing department may not love the practice, Kaufer says it “solves umpteen meetings worth of powerful debate and logical arguments.”

More advice follows – be sure to hear it all by watching the entire interview and watch episode I of this interview here.

If you missed a past episode of Founder Stories, you can get caught-up here. Guests include leaders from BirchBox, Foodspotting, GroupMe, DropBox, Tumblr and KickStarter.

Earlier today, TripAdvisor added its name to the list of companies publicly trading on the NASDAQ. After doing so, TripAdvisor’s co-founder Stephen Kaufer stopped by TechCrunch for a Founder Stories interview with host, Chris Dixon.

TripAdvisor offers user-generated reviews of everything from hotels to restaurants and claims “50 million monthly unique visitors and 20 million members.” Healthy numbers now, but dial back a decade and TripAdvisor was gasping for air. Kaufer says 18-months in “we had no clients, we had no revenue and we were running out of money.”

Realizing time was short, the team dumped their initial business model after recognizing a demo they released on the side “to showcase what someone else could do with [our] technology” was gathering steam. Leadership built a plan around the concept, added a “write your own review” button and was off to the races with what we now know as TripAdvisor.

Kaufer dives into additional detail on those early days, discusses Expedia’s acquisition of his company and voices concerns about Google as the interview unfolds. Make sure to see it all by watching the entire exchange.

Also be sure to check out Chris Dixon’s thoughts on the interview, the IPO, and issues surrounding it all on his blog, cdixon.org.

Episode II of Kaufer’s interview is coming up.

Past Founder Stories interviews featuring Mayor Bloomberg, David Karp, Dennis Crowley and many other leaders are here.

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 Expedia, which included TripAdvisor, in 2005. With 50 million unique monthly visitors and 20 million members, TripAdvisor is the giant in the travel reviews space. The site publishes 25 new contributions every minute and also features over eight million candid traveler photos. The reviews site operates in 30 different countries, including in China under the site Daodao. IAC chairman Barry Diller will serve as the TripAdvisor’s chairman.

The company appears to be increasing revenues by 30 percent quarterly, although Expedia warned in October that the newly public company’s profit margins “will be under a bit of pressure” as result of the spin-off. The company’s main revenue stream is cost-per-click advertising.

As CEO and co-founder Stephen Kaufer explained to us in an interview, the evolution of TripAdvisor into an independent, public company is about “unlocking shareholder value.” Kaufer says that the company will continue to ramp up its social and mobile efforts as a public company in 2012.

TripAdvisor debuted an in-depth social personalization effort with Facebook and so far 57 million users have signed up with their Facebook account to receive social recommendations and advice on the reviews platform. “We’re huge believers in getting travel advice from friends,” Kaufer says. While he wouldn’t comment directly on what new social features are in store for the company, he did say that TripAdvisor is looking at further opportunities, especially in mobile, and will continue to look at acquisitions as a way to expand.

Vacation rentals has also been another area where TripAdvisor has been expanding. While the company offers 200,000 vacation rental property listings worldwide, TripAdvisor will be looking to build its vacation rentals business in Europe and Asia, says Kaufer.

Expedia/IAC must feel that spinning off TripAdvisor as a public company could be a financially lucrative move. TripAdvisor, which was founded in 2000, was originally bought by IAC in for $212 million in 2004. IAC spun off Expedia, which included TripAdvisor, in 2005. The newly formed TripAdvisor would include all of the domestic and international operations, including its flasghipsite and 18 other travel media and advertising brands.

According to the release: It is anticipated that the transaction will take the form of a distribution of stock of TripAdvisor to Expedia stockholders or a reclassification of Expedia stock, with the holders of Expedia stock receiving a proportionate amount of TripAdvisor stock, in either case in a tax free transaction. It is expected that Expedia’s dual-class equity capital structure and the governance arrangements between Barry Diller and Liberty Media will be mirrored at TripAdvisor following the transaction.

The transaction is still subject to final approval by Expedia’s Board of Directors and the company says that it will probably seek stockholder approval of the transaction. The proposed spin-off is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2011.

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.

TripAdvisor originally debuted its mobile website in March 2010, and has since added apps for iOS devices and Android, Nokia and Palm smartphones.

TripAdvisor Mobile allows users to access more than 40 million traveler reviews and opinions on hotels, restaurants and attractions. The acquisition of EveryTrail fits into the company’s plans to enrich the quality of travel information consumers can access from their mobile devices.

In a blog post, EveryTrail founder and chief executive officer Joost Schreve says the community has created over half a million travel experiences in over 160 countries, with more than 2 million geo-located photos, since its launch in October 2006.

The company has raised $1 million in seed funding back in 2009.

As we’ve discussed before, Instant Personalization is one of Facebook’s more controversial programs (at least, it was when it was announced earlier this year at f8). Through the program, Facebook allows select third-party sites to access any of your public Facebook data as soon as you hit the site, with no logging in required. Sometimes it’s serendipitous, sometimes it’s sort of jarring, but it looks like most people like it (or at least, don’t hate it enough to quit Facebook). The program launched on Pandora, Docs.com, and Yelp last April, and has since expanded to Scribd, Bing, RottenTomatoes, and Clicker.

Facebook says that proximity of the TripAdvisor and Clicker doesn’t necessarily mean that the company intends to roll out Instant Personalization at a rapid pace, but that it wanted to get this integration out before year’s end.

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.

You’re greeted at the top by a banner ad. Below that, you get 10 sponsored links. To the right of that, affiliate links. Below that, hundreds more affiliate links. And more banner ads. There is not a single piece of actual content on this page. It’s one giant ad. And there are 76 pages of this.

Vomit.

This is basically the state of trying to do research online for travel. It’s one giant SEO play which drives the winner a ton of traffic that they then monetize the hell out of with ads and affiliate links. It’s more or less then worst experience in the world for an end user.

You’re doing research on a vacation, you want to see big, beautiful pictures of the place, some reviews, recommendations from people you trust. Instead you get hundreds of links that are bought and paid for. It almost seems like a joke.

Google search results for hundreds of cities around the world are no better. Maybe this is exactly why we do need something like Blekko. Maybe we need humans, who can’t be gamed, helping with results. And if they are being gamed, we need transparency to see how and why and by whom. I don’t know. All I know is that this current system is really broken.

And shame on TripAdvisor for putting such garbage out there. It’s enough to make you want to go to a travel agent.

Did you get this far? Impressive.

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 staggering 33%.

On the upside, Expedia’s flight and hotel bookings rose 10% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter following some expense-cutting measures and airline fare cuts. The company’s second-quarter profit was $41 million, or 14 cents per share.

And while earnings fell 57%, Expedia’s results beat Wall Street expectations, sending shares up 13% at $20.73 in recent trading on Nasdaq. The stock has more than doubled this year, up about 37% in the past month.

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Expedia, next to online travel agency Expedia.com, owns a number of properties in the field, including Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Hotwire.

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 the world, hoping to compete with the likes of Frommers, Fodors, Conde Nast Traveler and others. Oyster’s reviews take on a longer, more magazine-like form, and are all written by a staff of full-time journalists who travel to each hotel reviewed.

There’s no doubt that Oyster’s actual reviews are comprehensive. Reviews include a snapshot summary that lists detailed pros and cons of each hotel, and extensive descriptions on the scene, service, location, features, activities, food and drinks for hotels. Because the review is able to be so lengthy, the details given about the hotel are ones that you wouldn’t normally find on other review sites, such as the thread count of the sheets on the beds or which celebs have stayed there. Each review also includes photos from when the reporter stayed in the hotel (not the fancy photos pulled from the hotel’s website), a map with nearby hotels, and user comments/reviews.

Currently, Oyster, which launches in beta tomorrow, only provides reviews for hotels in Aruba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Miami and plans to add New York City and Las Vegas in the near future. These lack of options are no doubt limiting and even in the current coverage areas, not every hotel is listed. For example, in Jamaica, there are only 40 hotels listed for the entire country. TripAdvisor lists over 300 hotels, in addition to lists of vacation rentals and B&Bs.

To date, Oyster has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Accelerator Ventures and angel investors in March 2008 and plans to raise a Series B round in the near future. The co-founder of Oyster Hotel Reviews, Elie Seidman, says Oyster will make money off of traditional CPM based ads from relevant partners (Jamaica’s tourism board, airlines etc.). Seidman says the site will also generated revenue from leads to bookings sites like Orbitz, Hotels.com and Expedia. On Oyster, you can click to check availability of a hotel for a given date and will be given the choice to check Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz. Each time a user books through one of these engines from a lead created by Oysters, the site gets a cut.

The online travel industry has a whole is incredibly crowded—and there are many services out there that provide reviews of hotels including TripAdvisor, Fodors, Frommers and TripKick. I think the comprehensive, journalistic, unbiased style of Oyster’s reviews are certainly useful, but the startup will need to scale its number of reviews and coverage areas to be a serious competitor.

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 much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen.

Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing.

But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends.

The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets.

The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation.

Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture.

There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.

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 concept of the site has remained the same but Nile Guide has added more graphic imagery and high quality photos of destinations to add to the aesthetics of the site. It has also added 20 more destinations, so that it now includes customized, in-depth information for 100 destinations worldwide. Like the original version of the site, NileGuide aggregates information about destinations from over 10 sources, including Citysearch, OpenTable, Priceline, and Expedia, as well as adding its reviews from local experts who are familiar with the area. Now NileGuide has “suggested itineraries” for each destination. With all of this information, NileGuide has created neighborhood guides for various neighborhoods within each destination (much like CitySearch does). The site has interactive maps with the top destinations in each neighborhood. With NileGuide’s search filters, you can easily choose the right spot for any occasion, with options such as “price,” “kid-friendly,” hip,” and “upscale.”

NileGuide has also added a search widget comparison tool that lets you search and compare prices for both flights and cars via Priceline, Kayak, Hotwire, and Orbitz. The hotel search feature now injects real-time pricing availability powered by Priceline’s API. NileGuide lets you book your hotel directly through its site and offers comparison prices from Expedia.

Each selection, whether it be hotel, flight, restaurant, event, or bar can be dragged and dropped into the virtual itinerary, which at the end of the trip planning process can be converted into a handy PDF file (that can be emailed or printed), complete with all the necessary information, pictures and maps.

As we said in our original post on NileGuide, the site wants to be way more than a travel planning site and this makeover reinforces this ambition. The consumer and expert reviews combined with the ability to book flights and cars truly make it more of a one-stop-shop than its previous version. The travel search, planning and booking space is chock full of sites doing similar things—TripAdvisor also helps create itineraries but NileGuide’s new features and search capabilities go further. Zicasso and Offbeat Guides and TripWolf also assist consumers in the online travel planning process. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $9.5 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise.

In terms of features, Bluenity doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you’ll find all the necessary basics: you can edit both your leisure and business profile and you get to share your regular departure airport, favorite destinations, number of flights you take per year, and countries you’ve visited in the past. Bluenity lets users interact with other members, connects to their Facebook profile and enables users to share travel tips with each other. I think they would have been better off integrating tips and reviews from other travel communities that have been around for years and offer valuable content in abundance (e.g. TripAdvisor) and letting you choose which profile (e.g. LinkedIn) you would like to point to.

I also suspect they will moderate the hell out of the service because their Traveler Charter reads “the Bluenity community encourages travelers to choose good humor over conflict and positive advice over negative criticism. Optimism and enthusiasm are essential to maintaining a friendly atmosphere.” So honesty is fine, just be positive when you’re being critical. Right.

(Stowe Boyd even had his profile picture rejected because it was pixelated.)

I still like Dopplr better (other comparable services include TripIt, TravelMuse, TripSay and more), because it doesn’t make a distinction about which airline you’ve chosen to travel with—if you were in doubt, Bluenity only lets you share trips that includes one of Air France-KLM’s flights—and are open to include relevant information and multimedia content from third-party sources (e.g. photos from Flickr) rather than keeping the network a walled garden. Another major advantage to using something like Dopplr instead, is that the service leverages your existing relationship rather than trying to get you to hook up with total strangers.

What’s odd about Bluenity is that it displays travel tips and comments about hotels, restaurants, and attractions in all the languages the service is available in: French, Dutch and English, even when you indicate in which language you would like to browse the social network.

Last but not least, I think it’s a shame that they decided to boast about being the very first airline to launch a social platform for travelers, when that is clearly not the truth (cases in point: British Airways has Metrotwin while Lufthansa operates both GenerationFly and GenFlyLounge).

To conclude: I think there’s value in airlines engaging their customers in a more social way, as long as they realize that people are generally not loyal to either one airline company nor to a single social network. But it would be better for airlines to launch platforms that are open, or plug into existing communities by partnering with social networking services who have been doing a great job at building and maintaining groups of travelers for years now. Otherwise the barriers to adoption are just too great. Would you want to be friends with the people sitting next to you on a plane? No, you want to get away from those people as soon as the plane lands.

FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).

TripAdvisor plans to include FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract 12 million visitors a month in the U.S., and 28 million worldwide, according to comScore.

Mahoney previously was a co-founder of Compete.com. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is an advisor to the startup. FlipKey raised $500,000 last December from angel investors, including Allaire, Care.com CEO Sheila Marcelo, and venture capitalist Nick Beim of Matrix Partners.

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 the site only deals with hotels, though. Members can log on to post reviews, ask questions, finding travel agents, and use some new features like mapping their trips. The system expresses a clear network effect, getting better at recommendations as you and your friends put more in the system.

The big question is whether VibeAgent will draw enough users to the site in order to generate a network effect. It doesn’t hurt that VibeAgent is prettier and a bit easier to use than TripAdvisor’s rather dated design. Still they’re yet another startup hoping to re-map the “social graph” to provide a more personalized experience.

However, their most touted feature is a socially powered search, which ranks hotel search results based on your reviews and those of your friends/groups on the site. The idea is that the trusted reviews through social networks are more important than anonymous ratings. If you happen to not have any friends on the site, you can also search through all reviews by general concepts, like “hip” or “for golfers”.

Their engine searches over 120,000 hotels amongst Priceline.com, Intercontinental Hotels, Holiday Inn, Skoosh, and Booking.com. While it worked well for big cities like San Francisco, California they missed results for some cities in the East Bay. VibeAgent needs to nail the product for the anti-social users before it expects people to feel comfortable investing their time into the system. I can’t see the service knocking out Trip Advisor with it’s seven years of accumulated reviews unless they can at least meet that basic need.

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 2.3 million users.

Inside Facebook notes that the $3 million purchase price values Where I’ve Been users at around $1.30 each.

The purchase is the first major seven figure acquisition for a dedicated Facebook only application. Where I’ve Been was recently included on the TechCrunch interns list of favorite Facebook apps.