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?
View Comments (4)
Thank you Ryan, for your extensive review! My name is Lea Hajner and I do PR for tripwolf.com. We appreciate you thoroughly checking out all our features and tools a lot.
However, tripwolf is growing - the Compete.com chart is only estimating US traffic and from our experience their estimates are well below our actual US traffic. It is however true that our US traffic is lower than last year - this is because we had a lot of PR activities going on in the US last year and this year we've been focusing more on the European market. We are actually reaching all time traffic peaks at the moment in Italy, France, Spain and Austria. All our blogs (we have one for each language) are growing and we're sending out over 200.000 monthly newsletters to our subscribers. Same goes for our iphone app, up until now more than 160.000 people have downloaded our travel app.
There are also many new features for the website and for the iphone app, which are about to be released in the next few months. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me anytime!
@Lea, HI. Ryan is off for the weekend, but I took a look at Tripwolf's metrics via Compete, Quantcast, and the blunt tool of Alexa. Quantcast is the most accurate Lea, but your Europe and world numbers are obscure to them. Looking at Alexa, what you reflect seems to be true - a slight increase in visits and other metrics since your last press back in June.
I am sure what Ryan was trying to reflect is our collective interest in just why Tripwolf (which I personally consider one of the best) is not more utilized. I will not get into the long drawn out specifics here, but I think this is where the "tongue in cheek" PR/marketing tone set in.
Being a PR, marketing, and particularly notable startup analyst myself, I know PR and Marketing are not always given free license to build traction continuously - as it should be done. Now that I let Tripwolf's outreach peeps off the hook, reviewing the news about the service shows a very limited media outreach etc. You get my drift I guess. It was a good damage control effort though Lea.
I will level with you in all transparency. I personally contacted Tripwolf some months ago out of pure engagement to ask if there was anything we could do to help. Call it business outreach or whatever, not a single soul responded. Not exactly what my friend Brian Solis would call engage - ment.
On the PR front, Tripwolf has not been too much in the public eye on the continent where media of any kind is concerned. I am sure newsletter and other outreaches were successful - your traffic suggests so. Any way, our criticisms are not intended to be hostile. We just call it like we see it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to come by and clarify Lea. I will contact you in the very near future about what your team has on the burner, rest assured. I am sure Ryan will come and respond during the week as well.
Always,
Phil
Hi Phil,
I am the founder and CEO of tripwolf. This is a very interesting discussion, so let me add a few comments. First of all, thank you for your kind words, it's good to hear that you like our site!
On the marketing side, you are right in saying that we haven't been very active with "traditional" marketing and PR recently. And there is a reason for that: It's no secret that in the travel information space the game is about showing up in Google search results. After all, more than 70% of travelers start their planning on Google. So our marketing has been focused on getting people to link to us organically, rather than on "traditional" outreach.
And it has worked: We are very proud that we are one of the few start-ups in a ridiculously competitive space that have built and sustained traction. In the summer season we get up to 2 million visits a month, while we have seen many competitors give up. And one of the biggest factors in our success is our 5-language strategy.
Now we know that it is hard to build a brand through Google search results (especially when Google are keeping more of the travel-related search traffic for themselves, e.g. through the new Place Pages), and we know that many people still don't know us. But we have now proven our basic business model and we are just about to start shouting about tripwolf in various markets. (As a matter of fact, our first Marketing Manager ever is starting with us Nov 15th, we didn't even have that position in our team before.)
So travelers, expect to hear from us in the coming months, loudly and in multiple languages! We feel strongly that tripwolf deserves many, many more users!
Greetings from Vienna,
Sebastian
PS: Phil, I'm sorry to hear that you never received an answer from us, I just searched our email archives and found nothing. Let's reconnect!
"Hi Sebastian,
Thanks so much for stopping by. As we reflected, we admire what Tripwolf has done. In our efforts to help another player in the online travel space - Stay.com - we fairly learned what is what within this niche. Ergo, our continued work in this space including the news site you are currently reading, the Eastern European travel portal beneath the surface, and our continued commitment to help Stay dot com achieve their goals. A lot of irons in the fire I know, but the space is pretty big and getting bigger.
I have no doubts that what you say per visits from Germany, Italy, Spain and many others in Europe are as you suggest, the limited metrics at my disposal bear that out. Ryan, as I said, expected like me that TW would be much more widely adopted, is all. In any event, we actually do hope and expect greater things from you guys. You have done so much by way of creating this great tool.
On the outreach thing, I actually found the email I sent to you personally Sebastian. I paste the top portion below so you won't think I am "pitching" something. I am a transparent fellow when all is said and done. Maybe the mail got sent to spam? I also tried other means of contact - all to no avail - these things happen as we all know.
Any way, that was sent back in June Sebastian, the 11th to be exact. I will resent and reconnect per your suggestion. You may have been tuned in for the iPhone stuff and overlooked it. In any event, thanks so much for taking your valuable time to come and clarify this stuff for the readers. We do appreciate your effort. Please let us know of any news too.
Always,
Phil