Tripbirds – Get Friendly Advice on Hotels

Nobody knows more about your likes and dislikes than your friends and family, so why do you turn to guide books and generic review websites when looking for places to stay on upcoming trips? Tripbirds is a web-application that gives trip planners a way to tap into their social networks when looking for fantastic hotels and resorts in virtually any location.

Before turning to Tripadvisor or Lonely Planet to plan your next trip, head over to Tripbirds and enter your destination. By connecting the web-app to your Facebook account, you can easily tap into the knowledge base your friends have already developed. Tripbirds will show you a list of hotels at varying price points, starting with any hotels your friends have already stayed in. In addition to telling you which of your friends visited these hotels, Tripbirds will also import any photos your friends took and uploaded to Instagram while they were there. Rather than reading reviews to decide whether a particular hotel looks like a place you’d like to stay, you can click back over to Facebook and ask a friend who has stayed there for his or her personal advice.

As you scroll through the hotels on Tripbirds’s list, add any place that looks interesting to your “shortlist.” Once your shortlist is complete, you can share it with your friends on Facebook and see which of the places your friends would be most likely to choose. You can also invite co-travelers to participate in your plans and ultimately book your rooms together by going through the Tripbirds link to Booking.com.

Practical Uses:

• Get advice on where to stay on an upcoming trip to Rome
• Find out which hotels your friends enjoyed while traveling to New York
• Ask your Facebook friends to help you decide between two similar hotels
• Check out Instagram photos that actual travelers have taken at the hotels you’re considering

Insider Tips:

• Tripbirds users should connect their accounts through Facebook
• Tripbirds automatically pulls user photos from Instagram
• Users can sort hotels by pricing category
• The comparison feature shows how hotels on a user’s shortlist stack up against each other

What we liked:

• Tripbirds automatically pulls information from people’s Facebook profiles, so they don’t have to manually ask their friends for advice
• Hotel recommendations from friends are much more useful than those on generic review websites
• People can book their rooms by going through a link on the Tripbirds site
• The photos that actual travelers have snapped at hotels are much more accurate than the images on most hotel websites

What we didn’t like:

• Tripbirds is only useful if your Facebook friends have visited the places where you’re considering going

Alternatives:

• Everplaces – https://everplaces.com
• Gogobot – http://www.gogobot.com
• Wanderfly – http://www.wanderfly.com

Company Info:

• Launched: August 2012
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Stockholm, Sweden
• Founded by: Jonatan Heyman, Robert Kajic, and Ted Valentin
• Web site: http://tripbirds.com

Costs:

• Free