Tripwolf is your worldwide travel guide. At least that’s the angle this refined portal takes, combining travel tips from professional travel writers, with a vast collection of travel information – then adding community. Tripwolf boasts of trusted travel information for more than 50,000 destinations and half a million pieces of data travelers need. And best of all, the service actually delivers. So why is the service on decline?
Locations, city guides, user recommendations, and blogs you name it, Tripwolf has integrated it into their useful map. If anything, the Tripwolf user experiences what you might call a “complete” online travel tool. A cool differentiating feature of this service is the ability to ask one of its trip gurus for very specific travel advice about a locations, times, etc. And, users can print custom travel guides in a free PDF format. Facebook connect is also available too allowing for even further community possibilities.
The landing, clean, useful, right
As an international online travel tool, Tripwolf is available in German, English, French, Italian and Spanish with a click. (I had fun trying to read it in Italian) The UI is extremely clean, and the overall site usability compared to the reset of the travel industry sites is one of the lower hanging fruits. The massive amount of data on Tripwolf, and maybe too many tools, makes the site seem heavy and somewhat cluttered. But where else could they have put all this utility?
As an added feature lately, Tripwolf added and continued to upgrade their iPhone app. Though not immediately visible on landing, the app is a prominent and needed feature. The most recent update to its iPhone app beefs up its premium offering with the introduction of in-app purchases for destinations where Tripwolf provides more detailed information. Thanks to our friends at TechCrunch, here is a list of the apps features:
- travel info on 50,000 cities, countries and regions worldwide
- more than 550,000 geo-coded Points of Interest worldwide
- professional content from Marco Polo and Footprint travel guides
- constant updates and improvements by the tripwolf community
- download and offline use of travel guides (no data roaming costs!)
- user locating to show points of interests in the vicinity – even in offline mode
- photo uploads and user reviews (can be written offline as well)
- available in 5 languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Italian)
Tripwolf is venture backed and has teetered back and forth among the rising players in the online travel space. A quick look at Compete numbers tells a less positive story however. Tripwolf is losing ground popularity wise. Still, the freemium model is growing bucket of premium travel guides where Tripwolfs content rivals that of traditional travel guides.
Tripwolf drill down revealing iPhone and PDF guides
Each premium guide costs €4.99 and these include guides for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Florence, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Rome, Salzburg, Turin and Vienna, along with Denmark, England, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Scotland and Spain.
Unfortunately for Tripwolf, the one walk away I have for its company has literally nothing to do with the product or service offering. It’s this question: How the hell did they get away with that logo, when it looks like a perfect match for a ripoff of the Firefox logo? In all seriousness here, it is a puzzlement to me that Tripwolf seems to be in decline, it is a much better service than most of its competitors. Maybe it’s the marketing? The boy may not have cried “Tripwolf” loudly enough?
Tripwolf on a steady decline?
