Tripbirds Grabs Travel Recommendations From Your Friends' Check-ins
One Swedish startup that's in private beta, but still has popped up on our radar a few times is Tripbirds. We got in touch with the company and found out that they're building a social travel site based on Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Instagram to make it easier to get travel recommendations from your friends.
So say if you're going to Paris, Tripbirds would allow you to easily access your friends' check-ins and location tagged pictures to see where they've visited, so you can find or ask for recommendations. In this way you're able to get real reviews from people you trust, and not fake "outstanding!" reviews from hotel owners. This also allows you to get more personal recommendations than what non-partisan guides like Lonely Planet tell everyone.
Stay.com Is Your Best Offline Travel Resource
A great travel site that was featured on Time Magazine's 2010 list of the Best 100 Websites somehow slipped our radar. Oslo based Stay.com is a travel website and iPhone/Android app that allows you to create your own personalized travel guide using exclusive information from 114 cities over the world. But Stay isn't just some nice website with travel pictures; Stay.com's cool feature is how easily you can access your sightseeing information offline.
Reach.ly Connects Hotels With Travellers Through Twitter
Customers today have an increasing number of ways to interact with brands or physical venues. They can participate in online communities in social media, voice their feedback on Twitter, check-in almost anywhere and benefit from discounted coupons. There is also a growing number of companies that help traditional industries and physical venues interact with their customers. The latest example from this region is Reach.ly, a Latvian start-up that has just launched a service for hotels to reach out to potential customers through Twitter. Their idea is fairly simple: tweets about travel are one of the top themes on Twitter; by capturing specific tweets that feature a town of destination and delivering them in a real-time stream to hotels Reach.ly help hotel administration easily reach out to prospective customers.
Cabforce Taxi Services Just A Click Away, Partners With Finnair
Finnish start-up Cabforce entered the the taxi business scene back in 2010 with plans of building an IT solution for taxi entrepreneurs. The platform provided a web-based dispatch and fleet-management tool along with multichannel booking tools for passengers. This also included a user friendly software that helps cab drivers interact with both clients and dispatchers. Earlier last week Cabforce made announcement on expanding its cab business globally.
Planify: Plan, Share And Sell Your Travel Trips
Organizing a travel plan or a trip is a definite nightmare. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why we are always seeing one service after another attempt at tackling the problem. Planify is one more that emerged as the winner of the Garage48 Riga. The idea? It emerged from need as the Silver Hage, Co-founder of Planify made plans for his Tokyo trip and couldn’t find any tool useful enough. This led to the creation of Planify.
Share Your Travel Experiences More Socially With Globified
There are a countless sites and services online that cater to helping you plan a trip, book hotels or even find what places are interesting to visit while you are in a city. And I guess there will be many more surfacing as we see the approach shift from global to very local. Our attention today is at Globified, the latest startup catering to your travel needs.
TripSay Partners With Helsingin Sanomat
TripSay announced a couple of days ago their partnership with Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland, on their hotel search. Helsingin Sanomat is using TripSay's hotel search as part of their travel pages targeted at Finns.
The service is a co-branded partnership where the community is run by Helsingin Sanomat, the hotel search by TripSat and the actual hotel listing and data by Booking.com. Read more about the partnership on TripSay blog.
Traveas Expands Mobile TravelPlanner Service
Traveas, a Swedish travel information startup, has signed a deal with travel agency network European Travel Interactive AB (eTRAVELi). eTRAVELi operates big travel sites under different brands such as Seat24, Supersaver, Flygvaruhuset, EasyT, Töölö, and Travelfinder in seven European countries.
Create and Share Walking Tours on BlueWalks
BlueWalks is a Swedish startup online service for travelers who enjoy walking and sightseeing. In essence it is a Google Maps mashup, allowing users to browse, create, and share walking tours.
The founders state they want to give travelers a chance to plan their trips easier and faster. In the future, the BlueWalks team also wants to eliminate the need to carry along travel books and other material. The value proposition is users can create and browse unlimited amount of different routes around various points of interest, compared just a few routes typically listed in printed travel guides.
BlueWalks has been founded by an international team of students from the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES). The team members have roots in Sweden, Spain, Singapore, and China, providing a global view into developing the service. BlueWalks just took part in the international business plan competition Venture Challenge in San Diego, sent as a delegate of SSES. (Well, international in this case seems to mean that out of 25 teams 1 was from Canada, BlueWalks from Sweden, and the other 23 teams from the U.S.) BlueWalks did not get to the final, though.
Dopplr and Cubic Telecom Partner to Offer Cheaper Roaming
Dopplr, a Finnish online travel service (previous coverage) has launched cooperation with Irish Cubic Telecom to offer Cubic's MAXroam mobile roaming product with Dopplr branding for travelers.
The Dopplr Frequent Travel SIM card is available in both Dopplr’s and MAXroam online shops (although Dopplr's shop just links to the latter). It is promised to work in 170 countries on 450 mobile networks. According to Cubic Telecom’s CEO Pat Phelan with MaxRoam’s SIM card one can save at minimum 70% on mobile travel bills.
Dopplr allows making of travel plans and sharing them with friends to highlight overlapping visits of same cities at the same time. Cubic Telecom offers a variety of mobile network services starting from infrastructure backend. Dopplr has also some other travel products available in its shop, for example Offbeat travel guides. A somewhat limited offering still, but likely growing quickly.
