My favourite travel website trivago has been all over the news lately. Travolution, TravelWeekly, the Guardian and many others had articles about the German based international platform lately. Now trivago also has been shortlisted as one of the top 100 finalists for the Red Herring Award in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa). Past winners of this prestigious award include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.
Now that's cool !

Can't understand the hype and no clue what trivago is about ? Let me tell you ...

Members of trivago can share their travel experiences with other members and visitors by publishing their reviews and photos. Apart from that you can engage in many other activities such as adding links to other websites that might be of interest to others, adding features and amenities to the hotels in the vast database and adding attractions. Generally spoken - Everything you see on trivago has been added by its members and visitors. Every member engaged in the community also benefits financially, as the community shares a large part of the commission from hotel recommendations. Active users can therefore contribute to their travel funds, and again use their newly gained travel information for the community. The Travel 2.0 portal trivago has added a Greek platform to its growing family which already includes English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Greek, Polish and Italian communities. Further expansion is already in planning.

So what's in it for visitors ?

Thanks to the trivago community, visitors can find personal travel reports, holiday photos, hotel, restaurant and destination evaluations, beyond compare. Therefore, an honest impression of the next holiday destination develops because of the fact that trivago members write and judge only that information which they share between themselves.
Apart from that, at trivago the customer can compare prices with one mouse click. A unique meta price comparison for hotels helps the client to find the cheapest deal from various well known booking platforms.

As I've been a member now for quite a while I am proud to see the success of trivago. It's a bit like seeing your kid growing up ...

If you got curious and want to see for your self what this is all about just click on the banner

Published recently in the Guardian :

Elevator Pitch: Trivago wants to make online travel truly objective

February 12, 2008 1:01 PM

Germany-based Trivago combines reviews, stories and photos from travellers with e-commerce services like hotel booking. It's not the only service in the very busy and lucrative travel vertical, but it has a loyal 40,000 followers that spend 20,000 hours on the site each month because of the heavy user-content approach.

Founded in April 2005, the site employs 21 staff including 10 country managers for its localised European versions including the UK, France, Germany and Sweden. The Dusseldorf-based firm has already had one round of funding from investors including the Samwer Brothers, who recently invested more than $10m in Facebook, and raised second round from Howzat, run by the Cheapflights.co.uk entrepreneurs.

Trivago's finance and business development head Malte Siewart explains how the site plans to compete in an already busy marketplace.

Trivago management Peter Vinnemeier, Rolf Schrömgens and Malte Siewart

• Explain your business to my Mum.
"Trivago is an independent resource for hotel information. We publish consumer reviews, photos and offer our users a special search engine that finds the lowest prices from a range of hotel suppliers too."

• What's your background?
"I joined the Trivago founders team in 2006, and prior to that worked at HSBC and Merrill Lynch advising small firm mergers and acquisitions and capital market transactions. My Trivago colleagues decided that they needed some commercial nous to complement their terrific product, technical skills and fast-growing user base - I was the right man in the right place at the right time."

• How do you make money?
"Trivago makes money from advertising partners. You cannot book with us. We are an independent information resource for travellers. We work with a wide range of industry suppliers and booking agents."

• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"In January 2008, we are on target to achieve well above 2 million unique visitors in Europe. We're looking to triple that number during the next twelve months."

• What's your biggest challenge?
"We always see the biggest challenge as delighting the user. We want our 2 million monthly users to come back to Trivago and tell their friends about us whilst they are at it. We think that, in particular, we can do a better job making the site even easier for first-time users."

• Who is your competition?
"There are a number of competitors, as this is a very attractive area. The biggest competitors are tripadvisor in the UK and Holidaycheck in Germany."

• What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
"One potential new hotel partner had the cheek to ask if we would make all the prices from our existing hotel booking partners look more expensive than them!"

• If you had £10m to invest in another web business, what would you invest in?
"I'm too focused on Trivago to think about things like that."

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
We want to be the first choice for people who want objective and comprehensive "hotel information before they book."

• Are you the next big thing?
"We want to be! The hotel market is huge and we think there is a massive opportunity to be a better hotel information resource and provide our service to new users. We're totally dedicated to hotel accommodation and travel community. We are proud of what we have achieved so far but we feel the best is to come."

trivago.com