blog.triptouch

I just found out about the “Gap-Year”. It seems that the Britons (and other Europeans, actually) sometimes take a year off during their university studies, or after the end of their studies, before starting working.

We Israelis have it a different way - in age 18 we go to the army for 3 years (boys) or 2 years (girls). Then usually we take our gap between army and studies - and spend a little time traveling (usually to south america, SE Asia, India or AU/NZ).

But anyway I think it’s great to take some time off and spend a few months traveling. It really opens your mind up to new ideas and people. And it’s fun of course. I had my own gap-half-year in NZ and Samoa.

Anyway the web is offering some specialized places for people to hang out before their gap year with information. Obviously TripTouch is a good place to find information. Some sites go even further and give information about volunteering in some places, placements and jobs. One cool site is Gap Year World Wide which is worth a look if you’re thinking about a gap year yourself. I like the teaching and charitable projects bit. Good on them!

We have released a new version, which includes some new features -

• The ability to create different trips. There is also a new page for you to see your trips on a map, and you can share this link with your friends.
• A map to see where your travel mates are.
• You can now search for companions in your current or future destinations.
• TripTouch can now suggest trip mates for you under the ‘traveler’ tab, and you can also see the newest members joining our community.

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”.

Organic search is one of the major ways you can get traffic to your site. When we started talking about TripTouch we thought that we need to find other ways of attracting potential users. Organic search is very hard to do in Travel - there is so much competition!

However we’re now getting more optimistic about getting traffic from search engines. It seems that for some long-tail searches we are getting good results in Google. So for example if you’re looking for hostel les amis frankfurt in Google we are in the second place, and in some more esoteric searches we are even #1.  Cool. We are already getting a few hundred of visitors monthly from search engines, and that’s just the beginning.

Obviously we need a lot of work here - get more content, preferably original content, and also get more links pointing at TripTouch to boost our ‘page-rank’. We also need to make sure all our pages are correctly read by the search engines. That’s one of the reasons we added the ‘destination-map‘, for example.