Travel guides are a dime a dozen on the web. But for the most part, they’re not very conducive to really exploring – it’s not much fun to click through various guides to get a feel for where you’d like to visit, because each guide is loaded with a wall of text. Ruba, a new travel site that launches today, is looking to offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations.
The site is headed by Mike Cassidy, who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million. Cassidy says that his team has worked to create a very clean site that is very snappy and easy to casually browse through, with a strong technical emphasis placed on search. Rather than ask users to tag the guides they create, the search engine identifies keywords in their descriptions and titles. And while this can be prone to false positives, in the demo I saw it seemed to work quite well (a search for ‘kids london’ resulted in guides like “Top 5 Things To Do With Kids In London” and “The London Aquarium”).
Guides are all written and submitted by users, with Ruba pulling from Google and Flickr APIs to help pinpoint locations and provide some sample photos (users can submit their own, too). Cassidy says that users have been building guides to both serve as references for others, and also as a way to chronicle their own trips (which other users can in turn benefit from).
Travel is a tough space to break into, with well established sites like TripAdvisor dominating user review submissions and countless smaller sites looking to find their niche. From the get-go, Ruba is looking to spread virally. The site features integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect, allowing users to broadcast where they’re headed and ask friends for input (I think this will work especially well on Facebook, as items will appear in users’ News Feeds).
The biggest question about the site’s viability is the fact that everything is user-submitted, including the blurbs about each location. If the site can build a strong community as Yelp and Flickr have, then this won’t be an issue. But if people frequently visit the site and can’t find the city or attraction they’re looking for, they won’t be likely to submit their own guides (it’s the chicken and the egg problem all over again). That said, I suspect that many people will enjoy building their own guides. Trip Advisor may have a larger community, but there’s a certain appeal to being able to stamp your name on your guide, embedding it in your blog and sharing it with friends so your thoughts don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Seems quite good , i will ckeck it out for sure! BTW thanks jason for sharing!
Absolutely with travel sites its mostly the chicken egg situation – content is extremely important with first experience. If user wont find any relevant content on their first visit… its very unlikely they will come again if there are other options available.
Mike Cassidy is one of the sharpest guys you will meet.
Best of luck, guys.
TravelJournal.com to arrive shortly…
Finally a travel site that actually show you places, its some sort of preview of places you can go to.
Wow. This looks like a blatant ripoff of nextstop.com….
Wow this is great news. these are the smartest people in the room http://iamned.com/blog/
How do they plan on monetizing this site? I’m sure they could do ads and possibly a booking engine, but that would take a ton of traffic to make any money. I think that with so many travel planning sites entering the market in the last year or two a lot will end up in the deadpool!
A travel guide that uses images organised by lifestyle and category to help you navigate a city?
There’s an app for that:
http://bit.ly/ZL9ry
Looks like Mike has another winner on his hands. Nobody plays the first two years of a start-up better than Cassidy. Super intense and wicked smart.
Ruba looks neat.
*shameless plug* I’m the creator of TripnTale (http://tripntale.com) and you can see more coherent pictures on a place like Italy: http://tripntal...om/search/Italy or http://tripntal...m/search/Turkey
Just checked out http://tripntal...om/search/Italy, I love that the site has so many beautiful pictures from Italy. Thanks for the tip
Nice work MIke! Jason, thanks for the thoughtful review.
My favorite travel website is still http://wikitravel.org
Maybe not as many pictures, but a lot of useful information and usually very up-to-date.
What a great concept as probably the biggest drawback of booking anywhere you haven’t been before is knowing what to expect.
Travel companies will always give you a slanted view of the location so real photos from real people is a great idea if it gets off the ground
Very good travel website, and nice pics too!
@Isabel. Yeah totally — it seems like a rip off of wayfaring.com, epictrip.com, and nextstop.com.
Good luck to them — but perhaps they (or their users) could stop spamming the Travelfish forum telling our readers to go read the Vietnam section on their site…
Seems quite good
Wow. This looks like a blatant ripoff of nextstop.com….