Archive: March 2009

The leitmotiv of trourist’s travel philosophy is that experiences make the difference of a city over the others, and these experiences will be forever in a very special place of your mind. Of course, every experience needs human interaction, that’s why meeting locals is very important for us.

Last day, I came across with a very interesting article about some essential items to pack if you want to meet the locals. The following are several things to have in your bag to help breaking the ice easily:

• A ticket on the slow bus. When you board the overstuffed train or bus, likely you will be seated next to dozens of people eager to have a conversation.
• A deck of playing cards. Start to lazily play a game of solitaire and before you know it there will be a crowd of people eager to join you.
• Pictures of home, your friends and family. A few pictures are a great way to build a connection with people you meet on the road.

(my own proposals)

• Your city football team’s shirt. Football moves the masses all around the world.
• Typical food of your country. 600 grams of jabugo jam are easy to carry and can happily become in a gastronomical exchange.
• A volley ball.  A volley ball can be a good help to share some leisure time with locals (above all, when you are in a beach).

Do you have any additional proposal?

In April 24th, it will take place in Bilbao an important competition, Startup 2.0, whose objetives are to promote and reward the European Internet startups.

We are looking forward to taking part in this event, that’s why we would appreciate your votes in the following link. Three easy steps that will help us a lot.

Thanks in advance!

Third week of development: we have been defining together with La Personnalité the last details of the web’s design and Linking Paths has started programming.

The biggest efforts have been made to integrate trourist with Facebook through Facebook Connect API. Thanks to this, Facebook users will be able to log in with just a click, connect with their Facebook friends, and export their trourist activity to Facebook.

On another hand, we have been racking our brains about the best claim to include to the logo. In spite of having very clear what to say, it has been really difficult to determine how to say it. The important message is that trourist is going to help you to experience your destinations based on what your friends have experienced before (always having in mind that experiences make one place so different from the others). Our proposal is KEEP TRAVELING REAL. What do you think about?

Recently, Mashables’s blogger Ben Parr has published an article referring to how users use social media for travel research.

He provides an overview of tips an tools for using social as a travel research tool. He recommends the following steps:

1.- Utilize Wikis and Blogs for Travel Education.

2.- Scope out locales using user reviews.

3.- Connect with locals.

4.- Share your travel experience.

We share the same vision Ben Parr does and we are working to make the creation, enjoyment and remember of a trip more social.

What about you? Do you use social media for travel research?

We have passed the second week of the development process. Step by step, all our work is making sense, so we’re really happy.

Once the Web architecture have been defined, we have been improving the prototype of each screen (every small detail need to be fixed).

We have also started working on the Web-design. We will share it with you as soon as possible. We just want to let you know that it has its own character.

We consider we are developing a competitive product and fortunately it will be launched soon.

“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter”. This is how Mark Twain apologized to his friends for the length of his letters. Besides being smart, this quote is absolutely right.

In trourist we agree with Mark Twain, and we consider brevity as the best way to promote clarity. That’s why, we are very concerned about getting an appropriate format to help users to view and share experiences easily.

After doing several tests, we think an experience should not be longer than 2 or 3 twitts. This should be enough to offer your friends a positive recommendation to help them experience the destinations.

What do you think about? Is this “microblogging” format appropriate for your experience-telling? An example of an experience I had while I was in Los Angeles will follow:

“Probably is a little mess, but enjoying a sunset in Venice Beach is a must if you are visiting Los Angeles. Right there you can meet up with very strange people that will make you laugh a lot. There are also some bars offering a happy hour of beer (I was in a bar named On the Waterfront Cafe that was cool)”.

Total amount of characters used to describe this experience: 307. Does it work for you?

Last Friday we finish the first week on the launch of trourist. As we told you in this blog, our “travel mates” are Linking Paths and La Personnalité.

It has been a very intense week in terms of work. The week began with a meeting with our “travel mates” to establish the working methodology. After that, we have spent most of the time working with La Personnalité defining the architecture of the Web.

We’ll keep you updated with the progress made.

From our point of view there are two types of websites. In one hand, you’ll find websites that work just as a tool for users. In the other hand, you’ll find those that will steal a piece of your heart. An example of that would be Youtube and Vimeo. Both of them are used for uploading and viewing videos online. Even so, Vimeo has achieved to create emotional ties around the videos and it has been a key factor to fit in the industry.

We believe this is the best course to follow. Rather than turning trourist into a simple tool for planning trips, we would like trourist to be part of your trips, helping you to create them based on your friends’ first hand information. If emotional ties around photos, videos and music have already been created, why couldn’t be done for trips?

We have been using Tripit for a long time. In our opinion, Tripit is a good and easy tool to integrate and organize all the travel information we have to manage while planning a trip. It can be used by individuals and groups.

The most important features are:

- The possibility of organizing every detail into one master online itinerary. For example, by using the flight name you’ll be able to add all your flight details.

- The automatic inclusion of maps, directions and weather forecasts in the master itinerary.

- The possibility of adding external companies applications ready to help travelers’ needs. For example, Tripit allows you to use Expens’d, a tool to make travel expense reports.

What I like the most from Tripit is that you can easily add your plans to your iPhone using an iCal feed or .ics files. The integration between Tripit and iPhone is really useful.

To sum up, I can consider Tripit to be an important tool for those trourists that find it necessary to organize all the information.