Tripwolf Travel Guides
The idea
tripwolf is basically a social media travel guide. Browsing through the pages, everything seems to be added by you, a myriad of reviews on places, shops, attractions, restaurants and everything in between. tripwolf provides the template and base information and you get to review, provide information, images and videos. By signing up, you can add to the content or download local travel guides that you’ve put together from all the information available.
They’re integrated with Facebook, you can use the same login and import your details to create your profile on Tripwolf and find your friends on the site. They’re trying to encourage a community around the places, recognising good guides and contributors.
They’re launching in multiple English language versions plus German; they’ve got a Spanish language version due next year then French, Italian, Portuguese and Mandarin are all in the plans. The application is backed by MairDumont, Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides including Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo.
What I think
Social media overload was my first reaction. They’ve got everything there. blogs and wikis, images, video. They’re on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and probably lots of other places as well. Jennifly is a Community Manager/PR Person for the site, she’s running the Twitter stream and doing all the reachout to bloggers.
Digging through the site, the beta phase has loaded up a lot of content for the popular places but will need more time to become really useful. For example, London has a fair bit of stuff but Windsor and Eton, another extremely popular place that was full of tourists at the weekend, has nothing yet; it’s also listed under Wales meaning their location algortihm needs tweaking! It’ll take time to be really useful. I foresee a big risk of spam entries as well, so hope fully they have good moderation plans.
The Pitch
Like the site, a little too much at once. I got a Twitter connection, an email and then a follow up press release. All friendly, personal and well put together, but just slightly too much
