Travel Guides

Tripwolf is holding a competition that you might find interesting. They’ve partnered with FON to award the users who expand their network on the site the ‘most free’ FON routers.

Have you heard about FON before? If not, they are a European company that have created a global network of free internet access. How it works is, if you use a FON router at home, you gain free access to all FON routers around the world.

So, at tripwolf a competition is running to build up user’s social communities and the prizes are FON routers. The competition mirrors the natural community building experience of the tripwolf site—awarding one point for each friend and ten points for each new member referral. Every two weeks until November 25th, the two tripwolf members who have accumulated the most points win routers. More information about the competition can be found at http://tripwolf.com/en/page/foncompetition

Tripwolf is a social travel guide which covers over 200,000 destinations and points of interest throughout the world. Tripwolf is backed by MairDumont, Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides. The website was in the private beta stage and was successfully launched to the public on 1st July.

The site has a pleasant design and the interface is absolute joy to use and won’t take much time to get used to. The site can be viewed in German which is a helpful feature, also a Spanish version will follow in 2009. All the key locations are available in a list which, next to the map, makes it even easier to narrow down on your search. The site contains a Journal which contains experiences of other travelers who have kept a log of their trips. The Galleries are another feature in which you can share your pictures from a place you’ve visited and can view other’s pictures. This helps in socializing with others and also you can plan your trip based on other’s recommendation.

It’s safe to say that travel blogs these days are a dime in a dozen. There’s just seemingly an endless stream of eager bloggers who want to share their testimonials, travel photos, food and hotel reviews with just about everyone else in the world. From eager beaver first-time travelers to die-hard backpackers to regular globetrotters, all want to share their experiences, whether bad or good, with other people. In fact, the more people they share their travel-related stories and photos with, the better – and the best way to do this is to turn to the Internet and come up with travel blogs of their own. Unfortunately, it takes more than just photos and stories to lure readers to a travel blog. Sometimes a “bolt-in”, if you will, of various travel blogs from users all over the world is needed and luckily, a popular web-based travel journal and travel research tool has come out of its hibernation.

Well if you think Uptake is yet another travel site, then you are wrong. Uptake is a search for travel sites. There are tons of travel sites out there like TripAdvisor, Farecast, Travelocity, Expedia etc. So a normal user searches most of these sites to find the best deal and ends up wasting lot of time. What Uptake does is it searches most of these sites so that you don’t have to and finds the best deal for you. Like the site says “it searches 1000 travel websites and 20 Million Reviews”, which is a lot of content for a user.
Uptake is a semantic search engine for travel which makes it easier for the user to get more relevant results. It generates tags by searching various travel sites and their reviews of hotels, destinations, theme parks. By doing this it does not have to wait for the users to tag. With the use of semantic search, the ranking in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo will be higher and lot of results from Uptake will be shown for travel queries. The technology behind Uptake is really great where millions of reviews are indexed and arranged in a proper way and the embracing of semantics has helped them a lot.
It has options like “just get away, family vacation, romantic getaway, pet friendly, girl getaway” which search sites based on this consideration. If a user is searching for family vacations, the site looks for tags which are relevant with family vacations like kids, pool, shopping and kitchen and shows the result based on that. It also has maps attached to its pages to know the exact location of the destination you have chosen or planning to choose. Uptake also has a feature called “Things to do” for most of the destinations so that you are not clueless when you are travelling.
Uptake currently indexes only US Destinations which is a bad thing for a travel search site but I am sure they will add International Destinations too as they go along. With the competition in Internet Travel Industry increasing day by day, they should add international destinations sooner than later. The other thing I am not very impressed with Uptake is their User Interface. Its User Interface is not very easy to use, Any website which is asking its users to scroll down to see the important content is doing a bad job. With the content this size they should arrange it better and should keep the main page clean, Instead of showing most of the destinations in the homepage. When Uptake adds International Destinations, the content would be way too much and they will have an uphill task of arranging it neatly and adding more languages to the website so that it becomes easier for International users. Travel is not bounded by boundaries and Uptake has taken the first step to improve it.

Hello Sebastian, can you tell some information about you and the Tripwolf team?

I am originally from Vienna, Austria, but I have been living in New York for 2 years. I’m 30 years old and a passionate traveler: I have visited 70 countries. For the last few years I worked as a journalist and international correspondent for Austrian and German print magazines, covering stories like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the youth scene in Teheran, the hunt for war criminal General Mladic in Serbia or the working conditions in Brazil’s sugar industry.

I am running the company together with my best friend Alexander Trieb who is based in Manhattan. He has lots of start-up experience, both from the US and Europe and he worked in IT and management consulting before we started tripwolf.

At the moment the tripwolf team consists of 10 – 12 people, based in New York, Vienna, Budapest and San Francisco.

Tripwolf is a trip planner and social travel guide. Website is still in private beta phase, so if you are one among those who have been allowed to use it, congrats! Others can enter their name and email-id in Tripwolf and hope someone from TripWolf will send you an invite, or use this one.

TripWolf has a very nice design and easy to use interface. As for me, it did not take me more than 30 seconds to understand what does this site do and how to use it. My grandmother might take 60 seconds maximum to start using this site. It has a very useful drag and drop feature where you can drag the places you want to visit and drop it into your scrapbook, from where you can create a pdf guide and download it onto your computer. The downloaded pdf has all the necessary information about the places you want to visit. Let me give you an example, I created a pdf guide for Cairo, Egypt. It had all the information I wanted to know as a traveller if I wanted to visit Cairo like places to visit, shopping, nightlife, restaurants, accommodation and many more. This is helpful for travelers who can just add the pdf to their mobile phones and read it when they are travelling even without having internet access to visit the website.