TripSay Lets You Discover The World With A Little Help From Your Friends (Beta Invites)
TripSay combines social recommendations with a travel search engine that auto-suggests cities, pubs, hotels, and the like as you type them in. They appear as icons on a map, with a photo (pulled from Flickr) and description on the side, a tag cloud below, and minifeed of all the places you and your friends have rated or recommended. The detail page for each city shows other TripSay members who have visited, tips from members, the most interesting Flickr photos tagged with the name of the city, links elsewhere on the Web, and a list of the top-rated places shown on a map.
Travel, by its nature, is normally a very social experience. Most of us need help from other humans when we are in a strange place. TripSay joins a whole new group of social travel sites that are now emerging , such as Driftr, HereOrThere, and YowTrip. It also adds elements of guided vertical search like Uptake (formerly Kango). Travel sites that don’t make social connections a central part of their experience will have to continue to compete on more utilitarian grounds such as price and place discovery. And that is a very competitive business. The new social travel sites will compete not so much on how good their pricing data is, but rather on how knowledgeable their community is. Which social travel would you want to be a part of?