TheRodinhoods

Crowd-sourcing travel itineraries @ Tripoto

Anirudh Gupta

Hello Everyone,

We have just launched Tripoto.com and wanted to share more information about it with you guys @therodinhoods. At Tripoto we are bringing together travelers from around the world to share and discover – real, actionable, crowd-sourced travel stories. We are mapping every single destination in the story – along with the associated content and pictures.

We started out by listening to stories of 1000’s of travelers. We realized that these amazing travel stories need to be bought together on a single platform for easy discovery. We also realized that the information in these stories needs to be presented in a way that other travelers can use it.Somehow finding actionable travel itineraries is still a problem and we decided to take a shot at solving this problem via crowd-sourcing. Tripoto aims to solve the above mentioned problems. For our sharing user base – i.e – active travel writers, bloggers and journalists –  we want to enable them to do the following  – a) Share their stories easily and beautifully b) Create their personal brand c) Act as independent guides

Product Usage: The product and the content are the two most important elements on Tripoto. We are continuously building new features to make sharing and discovering easier, smoother and fun. While Tripoto allows anyone to share a trip with friends and family (through the private trip feature) – only a trip that meets the minimal quality threshold is published on Tripoto.com

Sharing a trip is easy on Tripoto and the trips come out beautifully with a minimal effort. The trips can be shared either publicly or privately using a simple toggle button. Public trips go through an approval process before being published on Tripoto (Only high quality and useful content makes it to Tripoto), whereas private content can be shared via a url with your friends and family. 

Below is a snapshot of our four step sharing process.

You can see below is a snapshot of how a trip would look on Tripoto.I am posting a snapshot from a trip created by Baichung Bhutia, Former Indian Football Captain, on Sikkim

First you can see the creator profile (an important element for personalized trips), duration of trip and high resolution images.

Below this you can see the trip overview, trip type, costs and other people on trip which are useful information for another traveler

Scrolling further below you can see the trip itinerary with all the places in the trip plotted on the map with associated images and descriptions:

The profile of the traveler who has shared the trip is an important piece of information for any traveler that wants to use this trip. You can get to know more about the traveler in the Profile section:

Some of our early sharers:  We have some famous early sharers on Tripoto and you can see more on their trips here:

1) Matthew Crompton – Winner Solas Travel writing award, 2013 – https://tripoto.com/trips/view/the-best-of-mainland-southeast-asia-6955

2) Terry Gardener – Travel Writer for LA Times, Featured writer on Gogobot – https://tripoto.com/trips/view/new-zealand-going-wild-on-south-islan…

3) Baichung Bhutia – Ex-football captain, India- https://tripoto.com/trips/view/a-glimpse-into-my-homeland-baichung-b…

4) Dhritiman Mukherjee – India’s finest wildlife photographer – https://tripoto.com/trips/view/chasing-rare-species-in-the-indian-hi…

5) Pankaj Chaddah – Co-founder, Zomato – https://tripoto.com/trips/view/a-food-trip-across-india-6829

We would soon be getting few more celebrities on board. They would act as an inspiration for people to share their travel experiences.

Future roadmap:  We would focus on improving our product (better search and discovery, improvements in the presentation of the map and the itinerary, gamification) and adding more travelers to our content base. In the next phase we would be also venturing into the independent guide segment. Some of our prolific sharers would be among those who would act as independent guides.

 

For all the travelers out there: Try sharing an itinerary on Tripoto. Its almost as easy as sharing your pictures on facebook and is definitely something that can be re-used by your friends and is more useful to the world. So next time someone asks you about a trip you can just point them to the Tripoto link which tells your entire trip story rather than showing some random photographs. If you are shy – share your trips privately and only those with the URL can access your trips. If you are a serious travel writer – build your travel portfolio on Tripoto and we will help you build an audience and market your content for you.

Would be happy to answer further questions on Tripoto from you guys 🙂