Sunday, June 03, 2007

TripAdvisor now on Facebook

Three high profile travel apps now on Facebook. The TripAdvisor-owned Travelpod.com launched a blog sharing widget last week following the SideStep plug-in a few days before.

Now TripAdvisor itself is getting in on the act.

The application is a Google Map mash-up, trip-sharing effort - and it's pretty good and very simple. Members can just tag every single destination they've been. Simple.

Facebook users can install the application easily.

Ideally - and it would not be a shock to see it happen pretty soon - each tag should also show the review of the hotel in which the member stayed at each location.


Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're about to launch a small travel community site and currently working on a FB app for when we open up our site next week.

http://www.Voysage.com/

It's going to be great to see more travel sites develop widgets/sharing apps for platforms like FB and MS.

Anonymous said...

Is it just me or has Facebook really started to kick-off over here in the UK in the past month.

Kev, have you noticed many visitors coming on to your blog or Travolution from Facebook?

I have - half a dozen visitors here and there, but I've not really promoted my group yet.

Travolution Blogger said...

Darren: There has been an explosion of activity surrounding Facebook in the past month, especially in terms of PR. It is 2007's must-use site.

A Guardian/ComSore survey last month found there has been an increase of 3 million users in the UK since October last year. That many not seem like many, but the base was 500,000 users.

The general feeling amongst many new media "experts" is that the Facebook user interface is much cleaner and easier to use than MySpace and therefore more attractive to older users.

In addition, it is not dominated by music and irritatingly heavy pageloads, which can often plague MySpace pages.

CANDY CAT said...

Yes Facebook is crossing the ocean. Received an invite from a contact in London just yesterday.

Mark
www.dineandfly.com

Anonymous said...

I can't believe I didn't pick up on Facebook earlier, it's a great way to network you and your business.

I agree about the interface though, FB, is much nicer, but it would be good if you could change your template colours.

[Mark, I'm in need of friends hehe contact me via the link if interested]

Anonymous said...

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/759&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

TUI - First Choice Merger gets the go ahead!!!

Edd said...

It's interesting to see that there are a few other apps on Facebook that do the same thing, and that TripAdvisor isn't the most popular!

Have a look at the Facebook Apps page for Travel & you'll see that (as of today - these numbers will change) a map app created by Craig Ulliott has 259,353 users, one from TravBuddy has 255,168 users, and the TripAdvisor one only has 55,017 users.

I've used a couple of these and have found the TripAdvisor one less user-friendly IMO as you have to be specific about exactly where you've been. So perhaps they aren't going to take over the world after all ;-)

Edd said...

I thought you might find this interesting as a follow up to the travel apps on Facebook - they can bring some serious traffic, but also other problems!

Travel Companies should definitely be looking at Facebook as a source of traffic and (limited) distribution.

Edd