Trippy lets your friends plan your trip, helping you more closely tailor your travel plans to your wants and desires. They allow you to harness your online social graph to get your friends’ recommendations for places to visit and things to do.
What do you do first when you first start planning a trip? You probably go to Google and search about the location you’re visiting. Or perhaps you visit Priceline, Expedia or Tripadvisor to look up hotels. There’s a lot of information, though, and it isn’t always accurate. Most of all, it comes from strangers, so you can’t assess how knowledgable they are about the beaches of Costa Rica or the pubs of Dublin.
Trippy believes there is a better approach to planning trips, and it revolves around friend recommendations and the social graph. So the startup, like so many other companies these days, has bet the farm on Facebook.
Once you log into Trippy with your Facebook account (there is no other way to sign up), you can start planning a trip with your Facebook friends. You then choose the type of trip you’re taking (business or pleasure?) and the locations you know you want to visit, and asks you to write a brief description of what you want to accomplish.
Once done, Trippy’s Facebook integration takes care of the rest. The system provides a list of Facebook friends that likely have knowledge of the city you’re visiting. Perhaps they lived there for a short time or maybe they studied at a university there. Trippy prompts you to send them a message to those friends, asking for their help. In addition, any friends on Trippy will see that you recently created a trip and are looking for help.
Reposted/published from Mashable – rest of the post here.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
