TripSay blog

In the latest build we added a few features we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. These are of course the digest emails and the possibility to follow other travelers.

Now if you decide to follow an interesting traveler you’ll get all their actions to your feed and digest emails so you won’t miss out on any new great tips or places they add.  Likewise the digest emails make sure that you’ll get a summary of the most interesting action on the site on a regular basis. This combined with the follow feature makes sure that you can now easily keep track of the newest and most interesting things added to the site. We hope that you find the features good and useful and as always we welcome feedback on them!

Nice headline don’t you think?

Well, there’s been quite a lot of buzz around the Dutch mobile startup Layar. We do also think that it is really cool and thus we created our own layer for people to use. If you haven’t seen a demo of Layar check out this video (or better yet, download our layer to your phone ). It is an “augmented reality” application enabling you to view content from various web services layered over the camera view of your phone. Thus you could just point your phone e.g. to a sight and read if people have liked it or not. We think it’s really cool!

If you have an iPhone or an Android phone you can download Layar to your phone and choose to use our layer (obviously named TripSay). It simply allows you to browse all our data with your phone as you walk the streets of any city. Just point your phone’s camera to any direction and see what places there are close by and what people say about them. Create a profile in TripSay, log in with your Layar and you’ll see places around you that are recommended to you by others sharing your taste.

This starts to be the kind of mobile travel application we’ve been wanting to create for a long time! Thanks to Layar it was quick to do too! Give it a try and let us know what you think about it!

We just made a new build of the service that we think adds a lot of cool stuff. Please let us know what you think about them! The short list of the biggest new features is here:

1. When you zoom in close enough on the map you’ll see all the places there are in e.g. a given city and by clicking “recommendations only” you can see only the places that match your profile. This is the view that has been our standard until today, but now you can choose between all the places and just the recommendations.
2. You can now rate all the places on the map and with each rating your profile is modified accordingly and your recommendations might change. It’s an easy and great way of finding new places!
3. You can now also add new places using the place’s address, not just dragging the marker around on the map.
4. You can now add places to your wish list. They along with everything else affect your profile and recommendations. Later on we’ll serve you with updates and new content on those places from the like-minded travelers.

There’s a bunch of other changes as well but especially points 1 and 2 we think are really cool and we’re glad they’re finally live on the site. Go and see for yourself!

Our latest feature for the traveling folks is the Travel Taste tool. We’ve found the tool to be a lot of fun, and were happy to read the Travel Taste preview on the Los Angeles Times.

Travel Taste lets you compare your taste with friends and gives you ideas of places to go and – take careful note – places to avoid! The lists of places are personalized just for you. Under the hood, the feature basically taps the collective wisdom of traveling crowd. The list of recommendations is calculated in real time, based on the the user’s ratings in the context of “taste clusters“. The more places a user rates, the more accurate the resulting list will be. Works for us!

Seems that it worked for the time-honored L.A. Times as well. They write:

TripSay.com is a fun tool that lets you rate destinations around the world, then offers trip suggestions based on the places that like-minded travelers enjoyed.

Well said. The full story is here.

Travel Taste gets even more interesting when you compare your taste and ratings with your friends. There will be surprising likeness and disagreements! Try it out at TripSay!

I visited the Travel Distribution Summit organised by Eye for travel on the 19th and 20th of May. The summit was, again, an interesting show although this year I didn’t make it to any of the presentations. Instead I spent my whole time in the expo hall meeting with people. Some people said that it was a bit quieter than last year but I couldn’t really tell. To me it seemed pretty busy still and there were lots of good people to meet.

The funniest meeting was with Michael Burnham from Tripmedia. Although we didn’t know each other previously he spotted my badge and came to talk as he’d heard of our company before. We ended up chatting for quite a while and at some point ended up talking about how old we are as we don’t really get twitter. The funniest part was that he guessed that I’m much younger than I actually am and once I told him the truth he said that it must be my Dolph Lundgren like looks that made him guess wrong. I found that hilarious as some of the guys in the office have mentioned the same thing. It must be the blond hair…

I like the TDS concept where there’s an expo hall, some free presentations and the paid seminar. As I spent my time in the expo hall I saw that many interesting companies had a stand on the expo floor. This year, a promiment number of companies were offering mobile solutions for travel companies. Let’s see if mobile finally starts getting some traction as the consultants keep telling us in these seminars. Quite a lot of companies were offering web2.0 features to third parties (pretty much as we do with the widgets and the api). Good to see that there are others, who believe in the same model as we do! All in all it was nice to see that despite of the economy there still are companies coming up with new ideas and technologies.

The TDS is a good event and definitely worth going to. There were even some free drinks at the end of the show’s first day making it even better. You can’t go wrong with free drinks. Thanks for the guys at CarTrawler for serving me the drinks whenever I ran out!

We also had a get-together with a small bunch of travel startups on one of the evenings. It was good to meet others trying to do something new in travel with scarce resources. The whole thing was organised by the nice guys at Tourdust. I hope that we’ll have more such meetings in the future! It’s great to share experiences with other entrepreneurs in the same business. Looking forward to our future meetings!

What a night at the Grand One gala! The place was packed with celebrating new media professionals who cheered to every winner and speaker. There were quite a few categories, spanning from B2B services to online advertisement. We saw some great performances when the gala went on and the winners climbing up to the stage were getting into the party mode.

It was a good night out. And it got even better when TripSay was awarded three honorable mentions! The categories were The Best Infodesign; The Best Startup; and The Best B2C Service. We went on stage three times to receive our award and each time with a totally improvised “Thank you” speech. Our thanks go to all TripSay members for your valuable feedback!

The Grand One jury stated that TripSay “is daringly heading to the international markets”, “has strong design skills”, “is a great Finnish mash-up service, that has got great attention internationally”, etc. Great!

Much of TripSay’s UI design is made by Valve Internet Agency. Big thanks to our friends at Valve!

More photos from the gala by MTV3 here.

It is always fun to get acknowledged. We are happy to see that TripSay was featured on New York Times. In the paper’s travel section reporter Hilary Howard writes about two new web tools that help in trip planning. She suggests two user-friendly travel sites: TripSay and Fly.com The article goes on:

Tripsay.com, a free social travel network, lets users share their likes and dislikes on destinations and link up with other travelers according to mutual interests. Members are asked to describe their vacation preferences, mention previous trips, and list dream destinations. A recommendation engine will then match them with travelers who have similar tastes and preferences.

Read the full article here.

This media interest further strengthens the trend we wrote about in a previous post. The time is getting right for the next generation of online travel services!

In just a few weeks, thousands of people will flock to warmer destinations for Spring Break in search of a break from the everyday grind. Whether it’s putting in long hours at the office or cramming for that final exam, we could all use a break this time of year.

TripSay has come up with a few suggetions for Spring Break Destinations if you want to have some fun in the sun this year or are looking to take on the mountains in beautiful Whistler, BC.

Top Five Party Destinations

1. Key West, FL
2. Myrtle Beach, SC
3. Miami Beach, FL
4. Daytona Beach, FL
5. Nassau, Bahamas

Top Five Spring Break Rising Stars

1. South Padre Island, TX
2. Montego Bay, Jamaica
3. New Orleans, LA
4. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
5. Whistler, Canada

With so many great choices to choose from, it may be difficult to pick a Spring Break destination. In the meantime, we’ve created a list of places you don’t want to go this year.

Top Five Worst Spring Break Destinations

1. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – Coldest capital city in the world
2. Fargo, ND – Watch the movie and you’ll know why!
3. Moscow, Russia – Third coldest capital, plus the most expensive city in the world
4. Baghdad, Iraq – For obvious reasons
5. Liverpool, England – Dark, wet and windy, and only pork pie to eat

Rich Truesdell writes an absorbing travel blog at AutomotiveTraveler.com. One of my favorite stories is his account of touring in Italy in a vintage Fiat 500. The tour is like a road trip to the past, driving through picturesque towns in the rural foothill. Rich writes:

If you’re looking for a unique way to explore the region, we have a suggestion for you: tour Abruzzo behind the wheel of a vintage Fiat 500, the classic Cinquecento. With the earliest versions now more than 50 years old, the 500 is the car that a little more than 10 years after the end of the Second World War truly put Italy on wheels.

The post at Automotive Traveler contains loving descriptions of great food and relaxing lifestyle. It certainly makes you want to visit the area and enjoy the beautful views and taste the delicious food by yourself.

Another great story at AutomotiveTraveler is Richard’s compilation of his 10 best road trips. Pretty awesome routes there.

It will be interesting to see what Tripsayers will be saying about the places mentioned in the AT’s articles. I collected the places in the “Touring in Italy” story to a dedicated group for easy access. You can find the group at http://www.tripsay.com/groups/Touring Abruzzo

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!