TripSay blog

30Dec2008

Tough Economy Tips for USA

The times are getting tougher for travelers: more and more people are looking for the best deals. Remember the top budget destinations list we published in early december? It has raised a lot of interest. It was even featured on a TV newscast!

The list contained the best bang for the buck destinations around the world. We constructed the list based on a huge number of ratings by those TripSay users, whose travel profile is geared towards budget travel. Now, as the queries kept flowing in, we gave in and created another list. Using a similar approach, we put together a top list of budget destinations in the USA. Some interesting findings there, please take a look at the figure below.

The size of the circle represents the popularity of a destination. A big circle means that the destination has got very good ratings for Tripsayers. The color represents the “heat”: the darker red, the more Tripsayers have visited the destination.

What do you think about the cities on the list? Feel free to log in to your account on TripSay.com and contribute your ratings. We’d appreciate your travel tips!

Posted in features, tripsay, web20 | No Comments »

29Dec2008

TripSay at LeWeb Paris

LeWeb was arranged in Paris for the fifth time last week and we were there with about a dozen other Finnish startups. With some help from Culminatum, we were also able to haul a full Sauna to the event, built on a truck! The sauna attracted quite a lot of attention, rightly so, or has anyone ever seen someone having a sauna right outside the conference place? Several interviews were given in the sauna and a lot of people used it to escape the cold at the conference, where apparently one of the heaters had stopped functioning and temperature was around 14C indoors.

The conference itself unfortunately suffered from some serious hiccups. The wifi or the wired connection did not work for most part of the conference. This is not new, since wifi seldom works at a web conference (exception to the rule: Slush Helsinki), but the wired connection usually works. When the Internet connection for Slush was built, we were able to do it with zero budget thanks to sponsors at Nebula and Cisco and some hours put in by our selves and it just worked.

There’s plenty of bashing the conference on other blogs, so I will stop it here and say a few good words. Even after all this, I think LeWeb 2008 was the greatest conference I’ve been to so far. The venue (LeCentQuatre) was great. It had everyone more or less in the same area with the main stage being the center of everyones attention. Networking and bumping into people was easier, since people were not divided into a hundred small rooms scattered around the area. The wifi being down also gave the opportunity to concentrate on networking ;). There were many friends there and I met a lot of cool new people as well. In the end, people make the conference.

The end party could have been arranged better though, music was way too loud to even try to conversate, it was too small and crowded and it took forever to get service at the bar. I’m not surprised most of the people left before midnight.

The startup competition had some very cool companies, including our friends at Zipipop and the winning face recognition service Viewdle. All in all it seemed like there are several promising startups coming from Europe.

Posted in conference, web20 | No Comments »

02Dec2008

Tough Economy and Travel

As the economic downturn becomes more prominant, people are looking for travel destinations that provide the best value for a dollar. Travelers want to get great recommendations and timely advice from fellow travelers instead of having to rely on travel agents’ sales people. Now, if ever, it is crucial that each vacation will be a brilliant experience.

We at TripSay figured that this is just the kind of challenge that our recommendation engine is built for. The recommendation engine connects you with likeminded travelers so that you’ll get their recommendations for cities, sights, bars, or even trails and hikes. Thus the recommendations are different and personalized for each traveler individually.

According to our active traveler community that has grown to 10,000+ users, the top destinations for a budget-conscious traveler are:

This top-list includes places that have got most positive ratings from budget-conscious Tripsayers. In practice, however, the engine calculates recommendations using a much more complicated algorithm that is based on multiple traveler profile factors. This is not only wisdom of crowds, but ‘wisdom of likeminded crowds‘. Travel information and recommendations on TripSay will become more and more accurate as the rapidly growing traveler community distills the data. There’s a good chance that you’ll get tips from travelers, whose profile perfectly matches yours!

Posted in tripsay | 1 Comment »

Archive for December, 2008

Tough Economy Tips for USA

TripSay at LeWeb Paris

Tough Economy and Travel

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