TripAdvisor, Inc. is an American travel and restaurant website company that shows hotel and restaurant reviews, accommodation bookings and other travel-related content. These days, there’s a social media app for everything. So of course, TripAdvisor is making one for travel.
“Eighteen years ago, we revolutionized how people planned their trips by enabling travelers to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds,” said TripAdvisor co-founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer at a New York event.
TripAdvisor isn’t the first travel platform to try and make sharing trips more social. For example, last summer Lonely Planet announced a new standalone app called Trips, which aimed to turn every user into a travel guide.
According to Nicole Brown, senior director of partnerships “The No. 1 goal is really to bring in that inspirational, aspirational content that really can bring people to visit TripAdvisor more often,” she said. “So, to make it more of a daily habit to come to TripAdvisor to look at your travel feel while you’re standing in line just at the grocery store, scrolling through and seeing some really great content.”
Here’s how it works:
When users log into their account, they can follow accounts in order to see relevant content from friends, media partners, content creators and brands in a familiar-looking news feed. For example, an article by National Geographic about a city will also prompt several related posts to pop up.
While it won’t be clear for a while how many average people decide to use the platform on a regular basis but they have more than 456 million monthly active users already publish 661 million reviews and opinions to the current version of TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor said that while the business side and social media sides of the business are separate, she wouldn’t rule out the possibility of ads in the future.
