TripSay Now Open to All Inviting You To Have Your Say on the World

Today the travel community TripSay is opening its doors to absolutely everyone by switching from private to public beta. TripSay is a social network for travelers focused on travelling where users can get relevant and highly-targeted information for their trips, including tips and reviews from fellow travelers. The functionality of the network is enormous, much larger than what you’d expect from a regular travel site, definitely. I am truly glad that this community of users passionate about travelling and getting to know the world around us will start growing faster now and adding new reviews for more places of our planet.

The main goal for TripSay is not to provide you as much travel-related information as possible - instead they want every user to be able to find only the information already filtered according to the user’s personal preferences. To determine these preferences, you will need to go through quite a long registration process. First of all, you will need to choose your preferred travel style- like the level of luxury you prefer, whether you enjoy sports when travelling and if you travel with your kids or with your friends. This step is not particularly long but the next one is terribly addictive:- you will be offered to rate a few places you visited by choosing an appropriate smiley for each of them. It does not sound addictive, I know, but they have a very strong motivation factor for new users to rate as many places as they can think of: every time you rate a new place, you see statistics on the number of people that added more places than you. And believe me, it is addictive: I myself spent quite some time browsing my Flickr collection of all my trips photos to add as many places as I could.

True, the registration process is pretty long but it proves useful anyway since it helps the service understand you, your travel experience and your preferences better to make sure you will only get highly-targeted information from them in the future. And now that the service knows you, it will match places, activities, sights and other information targeted at you and chosen by the service’s recommendation engine for your next trip.

Other than this unique approach to travel information filtering, TripSay obviously has all the staff that you expect on a web 2.0 travel social network: ability to create places for others to rate, ratings for various places, including countries or even certain hotels, writing tips for places, a message board, tracking activity in your network, groups. Everything you do here brings you some karma points (though, honestly, I am getting tired of having to earn karma everywhere).

These are the features that were available in the private beta but today they are also adding some new ones, including the world builder that makes creating and rating places as well as writing tips for them easier and group messaging boards for discussions within the groups of people with similar travel preferences or interests. What I personally like best of the new features is the bookmarking functionality here: it is intended to store your favorite travel privately to build your own travel guide for your favorite destination or destinations.

It still remains to be seen how TripSay is going to make its money. Normally travel-related sites can use affiliate links of various hotels or airlines. But since TripSay is based strictly on user preferences, I don’t think it can afford pushing some strange hotels at me if I prefer a very different type of hotels. Back in April Cecilia Aronsson suggested on VentureBeat that it could be ad-supported but I think that when people use your service looking at the ways to spend money (and we always spend money on trips, right?), it is not exactly wise to lose a chance of acting as an intermediary between those who want to buy something and those who want to sell them this very something.

But I am sure that right now TripSay creators from Finland are more concerned about getting as many users as possible to populate the world map with tons of useful tips and reviews about places these users have been to. It is obvious because no pretty user interface will make people migrate from TripAdvisor while ample content at least offers some chance for it.

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