blog.triptouch

There are many resources in the internet for backpackers… Interestingly most of them are not “commercial” but rather made by people who want to help fellow backpackers. I guess this is because most people assume there is “no money” in backpacking.

Reading actual researches reveal that the average backpacker spends *more* than other travelers - sure, they spend less per day, but their overall trip length makes up for it.

Anyway, there’s a new forum for backpackers, that I just found out about. It’s really new, so there are a few glitches yet, but it’s a clean simple forum, with emphasis on the “essentials” - packing, transportation, passports, visa, etc. I think that’s an interesting focus, and I hope these guys will be able to attract visitors and content.

Hello everyone, happy holidays!

Christmas at TripTouch, by Guy Pazi

We have added some more locations to TripTouch - in India, UK, Guatemala, Costa Rica and France. For these countries we have added many locations, but have yet to add more content (links and such) like we did for Israel, Thailand, NZ & AU.

Anyway we now have more than 3,000 locations (3,022 to be exact, last time I checked). And we’re adding more almost daily!

A couple of days ago Gil was interviewed on the Israeli Radio about TripTouch. It was on Reshet-B station, in a show dedicated to computers and internet. You can click here to get the audio stream (jump to 1:44 for Gil’s part).  Cool!

We have added photos to the site… It was something we long wanted to do.

Currently we support “public” photos, which means that everyone can see those photos. We are currently featuring pictures from wikitravel, like we do for the travel content. Users are also able to share their own photos, and comment on the photos that we have.

Personally I always like to look at pictures before I visit a place, so I think this is really useful for our users!

We have recently worked together with Eventfinder.co.nz to bring local events to our New-Zealand page. Now we have many events in almost all NZ locations - music, sport, festivals, markets.

We call our content strategy “glocalization” - meaning that we are a global site, with local content. This is the first step in this direction, and hopefully soon we’ll feature more local information sources all over the world.

Like many companies, we had to go through different names before we decided on the final one (at least for now, you never know). So when it was just Gil alone, he named the project “Travel Companion”. Not really a name he thought will be the company’s or web site name.

When we started working on the first prototype, Gil named it TravelFully. Something like - ‘To fully experience your trip’. I actually liked it, but most people didn’t. It took us a long time to decide about the TripTouch name. We had to go though something like 50 names. We asked our friends to vote, and TripTouch won by popular vote.

Gil would have said “and the rest is history”.