SideStep Acquires Travel Social Network TripUp
Duncan Riley
18 comments »
Travel search company SideStep has acquired social networking site TripUp for an undisclosed sum.
TripUp is a social network focused on travel and includes user-generated travel blogs, photos, videos, maps, and travel reviews.
SideStep had previously acquired user generated hotel ratings site TravelPost.com in October 2006.
I spoke with SideStep CEO Rob Solomon prior to the announcement. Solomon sees the acquisition of TripUp as SideStep moving towards becoming a data intensive network; SideStep wants to become the leader in online travel related information.
Solomon said that SideStep has a social networking strategy in place that as well as utilizing TripUp also includes Facebook.
SideStep already has two Facebook applications. The Trips Facebook application provides a trip planning service that currently has over 150,000 users. Extended Info allows users to add fields and categories of their own choice to a Facebook profile. SideStep is already developing a Facebook App for TripUp that should be launched later in the year.
I pushed Solomon on the question of what SideStep gets out of Facebook, given the still lingering questions over many Facebook apps that seemingly lack any coherent business model. SideStep sees Facebook as a customer acquisition vehicle. Solomon noted that although it is still early days in terms of what they are doing on Facebook, the company had already had over 1000 solid leads from their two Facebook apps, and expect this figure to rise rapidly as they improve their cross promotion strategies.
I think the sum will not be high. Cause I cann’t find very distinctive features in SideStep.
Trip Up sound like an ok networking site for travellers i see why there was interest to aquire this site . But me personaly i am a http://www.highflya.com person im not really a big traveller im an IT peofessional and highflya is a online social network site for professionals and has some very good tools.
I think so companies buy others out of lazyiness
I’m thinking that how the travelers get the information about other country like China or so? If they can get connected with people in China, I guess that will be useful for them to get actual travel guide.
But the question is how the online travel community like http://www.17zou.com in China be connected with sidestep?
Worthless news. No one has heard of either SideStep or TripUp. 1000 solid leads? You could get more from doing 1 days worth of PPC advertising.
I use SideStep every time I need to book a flight. It has a great interface for narrowing down search results across all sites. I’ll be interested in seeing how well the group planning works.
Why is the travel industry getting so hyped up, tripup, sidestep and Yapta I see some value in Yapta.
Vijay
They must’ve acquired it at a really good price in favor of the buyer.
chech out notebook.travel — all travel related sites and business should adopt the dot travel domain and start to stear away from the clutter of the dot com
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A website for great and fun city trip advice for the main European cities, check out CityTherapy.com. Its a great and fast growing online platform & social planning tool for European city life and city travel.