Triporama Blog

Triporama was one of three companies (along with Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Yahoo! Travel) recently interviewed for a Forrester report, “Demystifying Tagging for Travel Sellers”. As stated in this report, “tagging is an extraordinarily flexible way to label and share existing or user-generated content“. Forrester recognized Triporama’s leadership position with tagging technology, noting that the Triporama Bookmarks tool was the first introduced by an online travel site. Here’s their straightforward description of the tool:

“Acknowledging that travelers visit many different Web sites while planning a trip, Triporama’s bookmarking tool lets travelers collect, label, and share what they’re looking at all over the Web with other members of their group.”

As a Triporama member, you can use your own tags to organize web research in whatever way best suits your group trip planning. Looking for the perfect place for dinner? A tag like “Friday Dinner” can help separate the research (and discussion) from the broader list of restaurant options. For accommodations, use tags to delineate alternatives according to neighborhood, type (hotel, vacation rental, etc.), budget, amenities, and/or any other aspect that’s important to you.

Last month, we extended our Bookmarks functionality to make it easy to store and share the group travel deals and web research from our Group Travel Guide with others in a group. We also added over 30 new tags (such as theme parks, weekend getaways, and spa) to make it easier to explore content in our Group Travel Guide.

Visit our web site for more information on how Triproama Bookmarks work.

Triporama is honored to be nominated as one of Webware’s Top 250 Web 2.0 applications! Webware, from the fine folks at CNET, is “where computer users can learn about new and useful Web applications”. Their editors selected the Top 250 from over 2,000 unique nominations. Other nominees in the publishing category, alongside Triporama, include Adobe Flash, Google Analytics, and weebly.com (for creating your own web 2.0 site).

Webware will name the Top 100 based on the ten services in each of their categories that receive the most votes through June 11. To vote in the publishing category, go to http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/publishing.html (for all other categories, see http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html). Note that you can only vote for one application per category. Need we mention that we would love to have you vote for Triporama?

Regardless of whether or not you vote, this is a great list to explore to find out about some of the best Web 2.0 applications.

We launched a new version of our Group Trip Planner today!

We are focusing our site development efforts so you can best tap into the tremendous energy that your group of friends and/or family can collectively bring to the trip planning process. If you’re like most travelers, you really enjoy spending time and sharing travel experiences with your friends and family. The trip planning itself should also be a fun and creative process. Nobody should be forced to take on more responsibility in this than they want to.

Among the new features we have introduced is a fully collaborative day-by-day trip plan building tool. We have also added functionality that makes it easy to organize and compile to-do lists and to assign tasks. For a quick overview of these new features and more, please read our What’s New page.

This launch came the day after Triporama was included among AOL Travel’s “Top Ten Travel Sites You Should Know About. We’re psyched to be included!

We hope you check out the new Group Trip Planner and let us know what you think (via the feedback form on the site)!

At Triporama, we always get fired up when a top travel supplier comes up with a new way to make group travel booking easier.

Hilton Hotels has launched a tool on their web site that gives group organizers a one-stop way to find, organize, and book their conferences, meetings, and events globally. Hilton’s E-vents was created to help organizers find and assign guest rooms, arrange meeting rooms, choose food and beverage menus, and select and reserve audio and visual tools. Organizers can view group accommodation and meeting options around the world.

Overall, this is a well designed and easy to use tool and we hope to see others following Hilton’s lead. Give it a try at: http://www.hilton.com/en/hi/promotions/learneevents/index.jhtml

Note: Hilton also offers a newsletter with deals and incentives for groups.

It always feels good to get positive recognition. Triporama was recently named one of the “50 best travel sites you’ve never heard of,” by luggageonline.com. Triporama is listed at number 2 in the Social Travel Networks section, right below igougo.com, a really great community travel website, and right above the indispensable travel review site, tripadvisor.com. Check out the full list of great travel sites at luggageonline.com. There are many helpful, non-traditional travel sites that can provide great trip planning information on the list!

Got a nice traffic boost yesterday after getting picked up by Emily Chang’s eHub (part of the Web 2.0 workgroup of premium weblogs) and with the review of Triporama published by CNET’s Rafe Needleman. We really enjoyed Rafe’s review — he definitely explored our site extensively, understood the nature of our business, and took the time to write a thoughtful article.

I just returned from my annual buddies ski trip in Utah, which was a blast. It wasn’t easy to take a vacation with all of the work at Triporama, but I couldn’t think of a better way to do some “field research”. Since it was getting pretty close to the last minute, I thought it might prove difficult to get a flight that got in at the same time as everyone else’s. We had five guys coming from four different cities - Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco. Luckily, it worked out great. All of our flights into Salt Lake City arrived within a span of fifteen minutes!

For anyone looking to find good, inexpensive flights that fit into a group itinerary, the metasearch sites are useful. On Sidestep, for example, you can filter search results based on any combination of departure time (mine was 12pm-5pm), departure airport (Oakland and San Francisco), # of stops (nonstop), price, and airline. Kayak had similar filters, plus you can filter based on arrival times instead of departure times if you wish. Also on Kayak, there was more flexibility in the time filters (as narrow as 30 minutes). Both of these sites were easier to use than Mobissimo, which had more limited filtering capabilities.

There are some new tools for friends, family, and other small groups coming together to travel. For last minute getaways, Site59 (59th minute, get it?) offers travel for up to three people from two different starting points meeting at a common destination. The search works on broad destinations, such as “Caribbean” and “Europe” or even “All Destinations”. Travelocity, which owns Site59, recently integrated this technology into the Last Minute Packages area of their site as well.

For trips like my buddies trip, the most interesting new tool is the prototype from IgoUgo called MyGroupTravel. You can plan travel for a small group departing from multiple locations and arriving at one final destination. It’s limited to travel within the U.S., but otherwise it’s a very flexible tool that offers various options for arranging airfare for your group, including lowest overall price. There’s a lot of promise here for taking hassle out of coordinating flights!

Would love to hear what you think of these and other new web tools. At Triporama, we’re all about making the planning of your next group trip fun and easy.

To the best of my recollection, this is how it all started…..

Stuck in traffic, inching past the vendor stalls of the Mexico/California border, a group of my buddies and I burst into laughter again retelling stories that are only a few hours old. We’re returning home from the quintessential buddy’s trip, complete with late night poker games, football on the beach, surfing, jet skiing, plenty of local cuisine, and some adult beverages just 50 miles south of Rosarito Beach. One of my best friends had the idea of getting the guys together for four days of sun and fun like we used to do alot when we lived closer together. It only took a few phone calls before we were down in San Diego piling up the cars with snacks and sports gear. We attached the jet skis, and drove across the border to a rental house overlooking the Pacific.

So when the time came the next year, I was pumped to get an email about taking another trip with the same group. This time, however, the itinerary would prove to be far more challenging than just hopping in a car and driving to a vacation property one of the guys had been to before. We wanted to put together a trip with whitewater rafting, caving, Mt. biking, and hiking in the Pinnacles of central California. In addition, we were looking to spend a couple of nights camping and then in a lodge or cabin, the idea was perfect.

The execution, however, wasn’t. As anyone who has ever planned a detailed group trip can tell you, the phone calls and emails are fun at first, fired up to see each other. But quickly they become less enjoyable by having to decide on things like,� Where’s the best place to stay for the budget?� “When are deposits due?� “Where should we meet up before hand?� “Who’s the best company to plan our whitewater rafting?� I dialed up the internet, (I said it was a few years ago) and came up with still more frustration than solutions. One week later we had made zero progress and even though everyone was into taking the trip no one seemed into planning it.

To make a long, nightmarish group travel planning story short, we never did travel together that Spring. However, after the dust had settled, my buddy Marlon grumbled, “there’s got to be a better way, why was that such a pain?� And then it hit me: we should try to create the online tools and information necessary to make group travel planning easy.

I called my business-minded brother-in-law, and we in turn hooked up with an amazing bunch of passionate, smart, travel and tech savvy people and began working 24/7 on Triporama. Now I know what you’re thinking, “he can’t plan group travel, but he’s planning the tools for planning group travel?� I realize that this is steeped in irony, but I can only say that obstacles truly are opportunities in disguise and we’re just trying to build the tools that we would want to use.

So now, after more than two years of immersion in the online travel world, doing market research, and visiting just about every online travel and community web site there is, we’ve launched Triporama. Our goal simply is to enable planning your group’s travel as fun and easy as retelling the stories from the actual trip. And yes, I will definitely be using it to plan my next vacation with the guys.