Travel 2.0

Flying to Las Vegas? Family not around? Friends gone AWOL? With the help of Tripmates, you may still have someone to talk to come the day of departure. That is if this service catches on. OK, I’ll try to withhold any further pessimism.

Tripmates is a “mashup” of nearly everything to do with travel except… the act of traveling. You can get in contact with soloists destined for the same island, arrange to share expenses on accommodations with the guy across the aisle (this is probably most effective for group hook-ups, unless you think of this as some kind of strange offbeat blind-date service), and check out personal reviews of places you’re interested in visiting, as well as a growing list of assessments of hotels around the world.

They’ve got a ‘Trip Flicks’ element that serves as a feature that few, if any, long standing travel firms or review services offer themselves. It’s in beta and thrives completely on user submissions, but with Tripadvisor or VirtualTourist holding the fort at the top of the heap, Tripmates will have to initiate a quite the promotional blitz to get the toehold and traffic it needs to keep searches of its database from coming up empty.

Hey, for what it is, ‘Trip Flicks’ is worth the peek alone.