Tripwolf and the Business Models

Tripwolf is a virtual travel guide which melts advices from tourist professionals (e.g journalists specialized in tourism) and travelers’ experiences. It enables the visitor to discover information on hundreds of destinations, to plan a trip thanks to rates and advices from experts and community members who already visited a country, to share experiences thanks to articles and photo downloads, and enables him to create his own personalized travel guide. It is also an intermediary between consumers and tourist service providers (for example dozens of hotels brokers for the booking process).

The website is based on several business models:

1.The Advertising Business Model: it provides free content or service and mainly generates revenues thanks to banner ads of partners.

2.The Infomediary Business Model: it collects information about service providers (in this case: hotels, attractions, transports and every service which goes with the tourism industry) for the consumers and gives information about the consumers (thanks to the information filled up during the registration procedure) to the service providers.
More specifically Tripwolf based itself on the metamediary concept which means it facilitates transaction between consumers and service providers thanks to comprehensive information and strong advices but without involving itself further.

3.The Affiliates Business Model: Tripwolf provides purchase opportunity to its partners thanks to ads present on its webpage. More specifically the website specialized itself on the banner exchange with airlines, and attraction sites such as Center Park.
4.The Community Business Model: Tripwolf is based on a Open Content model which means everyone can voluntarily write an article and give his opinion and experience on a tourist service (hotels, tourist attractions, city or everything) in order to help other community members in their trip planning.

This association of business models is favorable in many ways:

- Customers can find mainly everything on the website and are facilitated in their planning thanks to experts or community members’ advices and experiences. In a way they have the assurance they will not be disappointed by a destination if they referred to community members opinions. They are also put in relation with service providers in order to fasten their purchase/booking process.

- Partners can enhance their credibility thanks to favorable reports from community members. Moreover they can touch a wider target without spending too much in advertising campaigns.

- Owners have built a strong and sustainable business based on community which means they do not have to invest a lot of time or money to make it grow. They also reach a wide range of people from everywhere.

Tripwolf do not target a specific segment but is made for approximately everyone who wants to travel or share experiences in tourism. Target can be from any age, any sex and any countries. They can be professionals, beginners in the tourism experience.
As said earlier, Tripwolf mainly generates revenues from advertising and partnerships. They also offer a sort of premium partnerships (called Preferred partnerships) which guarantee:

- Preferred listing on the travel guide pages of the city they are from
- Preferred listing on profile pages of their competitors with standard listings
- Preferred listing in the mobile iPhone travel guide of the city they are from
- Translation service for their business descriptions in any languages
- Search Engine Optimization for improved search results of the tripwolf listing

More and more websites choose to develop the same kind of services surfing on the success of pioneers such as Tripadvisor. One of them is Travellerspoint which, as well as Tripwolf is more focusing on the concept of world-travelers community exchanging experiences than strict exchange of opinion on a specific hotel or restaurant.

Based on the same travel community is TravBuddy which enables the community member to

find travel buddies, share travel tips or record travel experiences.

Unfortunately this kind of business model is not viable offline. The main reason why is because it is based on the gathering of many people from everywhere, sharing the same passion but each in various ways (due to culture differences for example). The success of this business model is that people be helped in their planning process thanks to thousands of advices and experiences and not only one. It is quite impossible to gathers such an amount of opinions offline.
In contrary the model is sustainable online because more and more people needs to be sure of what they are buying. The importance of advices and opinions on a service is getting stronger and stronger. People are now looking for other people to help them in their decision making process giving them tips and sharing experiences with them. This way they feel more secure and are not afraid to be disappointed in something they invested in.

In order to increase users and customers Tripwolf owners should attract people with new concepts such as “Celebrity perfect trip” giving the opportunity for celebrities to talk about destinations they love and sites where they like to spend time.
They could also surf on the success of community blogs such as Facebook and Twitter and create special page on both websites.
In order to increase their revenues Tripwolf owners could develop a Premium application for the Iphone (which is for the moment free) maybe by offering location analysers: people in a foreign city turn on the application which tells them where they are exactly in the city and where are hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc…. in their surroundings (like a GPS).
They could also develop a Brokerage Business Model and get charge a fee or commission for each transaction it enables.