Triptease is Really, Really, the Future of Travel Reviews

Triptease makes Tripadvisor totally obsolete…

Now that my invite to travel Triptease has been mailed, received, and opened, the latest in a line of online travel tools gets a bit of Argo love, or hate, depending. If ever you feverishly desired making a magazine from your travels, Triptease may just be your dream come true. Let’s find out 1 -2 -3.

If there’s one thing the web and mobile is quickly becoming, it is dog gone text unfriendly. People simply want things slick and easy, and fast. Reading, despite the wonders therein, is onerously time consuming in a digital world – and inputting text? Eeek! Here I am pecking away in the hope’s you’ll have time to read this. Triptease is fully geared to solve this for travelers.

One – Signup and the Learning Curve

Email, link click, hit Facebook, and you’re in. “Travel Reviews Worth Sharing” is the dogma, and as for the so called “learning curve”, Triptease lives up to its name. The screen below shows what this startup is all about with a picture – no thousand words needed to see Triptease has a well thought out understanding of users. There is no learning curve – the term “intuitive” used to describe user interfaces applies here. For an experienced or even inexperienced digital user, the icons and nav are just easy.

Two – Your Stuff

Figuring out your “stuff” is pretty simple using Triptease too. The gear icon leads to your little dashboard where you customize your profile and preferences, etc. But what I mean by “stuff” is the personal usage trimmings you’ll end up clicking away at. The only way to show this is with my own “use case” scenario, so here goes. Oh! One thing the new user will find out is just how sneaky smart the developers are here too – to “review” more than one place one has to get “likes” :)

As it happens Mihaela and I just reviewed a restaurant in our town here in Germany, so.

Right here is where even I got a bit amazed by Triptease. The aforementioned restaurant, Le Cinque Stelle, has to my knowledge never been reviewed online – it is actually brand new in this respect save Mihaela’s Epoch Times post here. Now, looking at the screen below you will note the pulldown showing not only the restaurant, but the address and etc.

When you start using Triptease you’ll instantly notice the things I am describing here. The next screen shows some interesting stuff too. First, you see Mihaela taking notes in this “preference” interface after I uploaded an image of the restaurant in question. This is indicative of several things actually. For one, showing the “reviewer” actually taking notes validates the review instantly. And, the flexibility of Triptease shines through again as you see in the thematic and preference choices indicated.

Make a note here, the whole process including me typing this here has taken about 30 seconds. Now, the next screen shows several more elements all at once. I direct your attention to my use of the term “all at once” here for this reason, this user interface is really slick and fast. As you can see below our little review is already in killer magazine format, and the share potential and ease is apparent too… and, and, and. (don’t you hate it when I like something?)

Three – Voila! The Future of Reviews for Travel

No, Triptease has not paid me. We have been harping about VC and developers getting on the bandwagon to create something like this for, oh …… 5 years maybe? Let me give you the skinny on Triptease right here. In the time it would have taken me to sign up for Tripadvisor, figure out what the hell they need me to do, and actually post a text review with a pissy little picture, I have created a review with several crucial features.

This review platform:

1. Can easily validate the credibility of not only the reviewer, but the venue to an extent
2. Took far less time and with far more impact
3. Created a truly “munchable” bite of useful traveler info
4. Allowed for supremely social potential
5. Created a dual branding element (venue – reviewer) of immense potential
6. And the whole process was just plain FUN

The screen above shows our little Italian restaurant, but the one below opens up a whole new world of possibility. I am pretty sure anyone who is in the business of sharing info about places will instantly fall in love with Triptease. As you can see below, not only is there a huge rating value for all concerned, but interaction as this shows leads to a whole new spectrum of provider – client possibilities. The “discussion” aspect of these reviews is maybe the most powerful part of Triptease potential. As you can see below, I have put some red dots to show where the developers made this process easier too. The ones on the right are the space where, my choices on the left were – object oriented and clickable comments or remarks, now that’s intuitive.

To wind this all up, I commented on my Google + share of Triptease that if “Google does not buy this startup today or clone it, you guys are not nearly as smart as I think you are.” I would be really surprised if Triptease does not go on the auction block very soon. It’s that good, but is it perfect? Yep, save adding more features like embed and video and so on.

Following great people with like ideas, and better yet fantastic places to go and do, this is the last home run Triptease affords users. In the ten years I have reviewed startups, I do not think I have ever run across one that really lived up to the PR hype. Not like this. Maybe Triptease just satisfies a lot of needs for our own app development? Whatever, Founder Charlie Osmond is about to be very rich if my deductions are correct.

I leave you guys with one last review from Triptease, and the idea of “affection” too – there’s a lot more to Triptease than the tease.