blog.triptouch

A couple of days ago we drove to Raanana to meet Elliot and Yotam, the founders of Tripcart.

It was interesting to meet another Israeli travel startup, and to find the similarities and differences. I think both companies started from the same motivation: the love for travel and the vision of creating a better solutions for travellers.

Other than that we took very different paths: Tripcart focus is planning, TripTouch focus is “on the go”; they cover the US - we are worldwide; they create their own original content while we aggregate and integrate from other sources; they are into family vacations and we approach independent and business travellers.

We both face similar challenges with competition and investments. I wish Tripcart success- and maybe we’ll find a way to help each other along the way.

We have added hotels to TripTouch! Over 16,000 hotels are now available… in many locations. We have partnered with priceline to offer on-line booking at great prices.

Wanna find something cool to do in April/May? Here’s a nice list of events you can find world-wide.

I’d like to see the hot-air balloon thing, personally.

We have added a new feature to TripTouch - Activities. Now you can find local tours, extreme sports, nightlife, animal encounters and all sorts of local activities to do. You can also do online booking, of course.

We have activities for many destinations worldwide (we partnered with Viator for the activities). We will soon add another supplier to give even more activities, and for more places, too.

Enjoy

We have added new sport events to TripTouch, from SportEvents365. Now we have thousands of new events, all over the world - Football, basketball, tennis, and more. You can also buy tickets to almost all these events!

We’re always working to add more and more content to TripTouch, stay tuned in the next few weeks for more such announcements.

Several years ago, travel communities were a huge promise. Many websites tried to give travelers what they want – a place to share their experiences, find new travel mates, upload their photos, and a place to ask questions and get information about their planned trips. Examples for travel communities include WAYN, TripUp, TravBuddy and RealTravel.

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We like the Times! They seem to like us too - “this site is ahead of its competitors because of its clean design and good choice of partner sites”. Check it out here.

Searching for good content, we sometimes stumble across some funny photos. I dunno why, but we have a collection of funny toilet signs in TripTouch. Anyway we compiled the funniest ones here. I love the first one - the Great wall is awesome!

Enjoy…

Last week we experienced some nasty things happening on our DB. We had some issues with data corruption, and the site was behaving strangely for a few hours.

Luckily we managed to keep everything intact, no data was lost, and the site is now okay.  Man, those were some annoying hours, but all’s well that ends well.

Have a nice week!

We have uploaded a new version today - the major change is that all photos (both travel guide ones and your profile photos) are now stored in Amazon S3. It was rather easy to move our photos to them (well, Guy did it, so for me it was really easy). S3 saves us all sorts of worries (disk space, backups, server I/O and CPU issues) - and the cost is okay too. Good on you Amazon!