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.

Randomly surfing the web I noticed a strange message instead of the Tripup homepage: ” Tripup is gone, sorry. Maybe you can use Facebook instead, it’s very popular.”

It’s sad to see a website gone, or “deadpooled“- knowing the effort and energy it needs to build it.

I found Tripup (or as it was called then TripMates) when I started to work on our project. I quite liked the site and considered it as a fair competitor. Then I read that it was acquired by sidestep, we saw it as a good sign- a well established travel site acquires a travel community.

The problem probably was that tripup never got traction and traffic, and Sidestep merger to Kayak caused changes in the focus (as Tim in the BOOT hints).

So we say to Tripup users: Facebook is very popular indeed, but it’s not a travel tool. Try triptouch.com and you’ll find here most of the features you used to have in tripup.

And if someone from Tripup reads this, why don’t you contact us? Maybe we can think of a way to help your community.