Product 360: All New "Tripbirds": Book Hotels With Help From Your Social Channel Friends

4 September, 2012   Booking Engines, Consumer Travel Products, Product 360, Social Media, Travel Technology, Trips and Tips   1 Comment
TripBirds Logo

Tripbirds was launched on March 2012 with focus on social travel – pulling recommendations from friends and helping the traveler in planning the trip. But, on June 2012 Tripbirds announced that they will be shuting down the service for sometime and would relaunch it very soon. The company received angel investors from notable investors. On August 28 2012 the company rolled out its refreshed product. Now, Tripbirds is a “social hotel booking” website. The site pulls hotels (stayed) of the user’s Facebook friends and displays it for user to make an informed decision.

Social travel isn’t a new concept and hotel booking market isn’t completely dominated. There is always a scope for doing things little differently. Tripbirds can be seen as a social hotel booking platform, but this platform will be effective only when the user adoption (from Facebook) is very high. Lets discuss the features of  the ‘refreshed’ Tripbirds.

User will be able to search for hotels by location, travel dates, rooms. The unique aspect in the search widget is the “Rooms” section – Innovatively designed, neat and different. We strongly recommend our readers to “experience” the Rooms field in Tripbirds. The “Rooms” field is designed like a physical room (rectangle box) itself, it definitely deserves +1. Refer screen below.

In the hotel search results page – users are shown the hotels that their friends stayed in. Also, hotels that friends haven’t visited are also listed. User will be able to send a message to the friend who has stayed in a hotel – this is achieved in just a click in Tripbirds. Easy.
The hotel inventory is pulled from Booking.com. In addition to displaying the hotel’s official pictures, Tripbirds displays the pictures of the hotel from Instagram too.
Hotels can be added to the “Shortlist” bar at the bottom of the page. The animation used to add hotels to the shortlist is nice. No lag and its smooth. Refer screen below.
Users can also compare hotels where almost all parameters of hotel is displayed for comparison – including the Facebook check-ins, fan ‘like’ numbers, Instagram photos.
Overall – ‘Tripbirds’ has narrowed down their offering from being a general social recommendation site to “social hotel booking” site. The competitive landscape in this exact segment is pretty heavy – TripAdvisor, Gogobot, Trippy etc. The user interface is good in Tripbirds. Right now, travelers are directed to booking.com for completing the hotel reservation. We hope that in future, Tripbirds allows travelers to book their hotel in Tripbirds itself. Rolling out more social channel integrations, innovative features, end-to-end service, retaining customers are going to be key factors in the success of Tripbirds.

Author: Karthick Prabu

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One Response to Product 360: All New "Tripbirds": Book Hotels With Help From Your Social Channel Friends

  1. John Smith says:
    28 September, 2012 at 4:43 pm

    Really beautfull post in this website………………. Delhi Hotels Booking

    Reply