TravellersPoint - Norway's Pride In Travel
Travellerspoint is a Norwegian community based travel website that both combines wiki-style guides and a personal plaform for content sharing. Travellerspoint offers a relatively good source of information on numerous cities as well as a place to host your travel photos as well as blog about your travels. The site is by all means popular - their tour states they have over 178 000 travellers registered as members.
Despite the success with the site (it gathers about 50-60k uniques a month), they have not managed to integrate the different parts of the site very well. I guess this is something that still lacks in many ways across the industry. I have to say that TripSay is perhaps a step closer to this (then again - they do lack the large community TravellersPoint has). By integrating the services I mean the issue of combining them closer instead of having each service in its own "silo" and not cross-linking for example. I'm sure there is a ton of interesting data to be found from the travel stories of people in the blogs - but the link between these and the wiki-style guides is still missing.
TravellersPoint's business model at the moment is advertising and commissions from hotel and hostel bookings, as one might guess. The interesting question to ask is will these sites gain more traffic as people search deeper online for that best deal on hotels in a certain city or will they suffer from the downturn in the same way as the travel industry in general?
Takk for det :) Integration is one of our main goals, if not our only goal, for 2009. Like you mention, we have a lot of great content but it's not linked intuitively for users at the moment. There are areas where there *is* heavy cross usage, but it can be improved for a lot of others. For example the wiki allows inserting of photos quite easily and on country pages there are links to country blog entries as well, but not directly to each blog entry and not including snippets.
On the up-side, we already have the content that a lot of other start ups are still trying to garner :)
Side note; those uniques are way off (not sure where they are from?). It's at least 10 times that number (using G Analytics).
Thanks again for taking the time to really review the site and not just copy what so many others have already written!
It is really a wonderful site you are introducing us to.It is really a great destination for the travel writer to share their content.Thanks for providing such an wonderful information.
http://www.voyageafrica.net/serengeti-national-park-perfectly-serene.html