Last week Alex and I went to PhocusWright in Los Angeles, the online travel industry’s most important conference. It was great to hear the speeches of Expedia’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Kayak’s CEO Steve Hafner and, of course, Tripadvisor’s CEO Steve Kaufer – our big competitor, even if we are probably still flying under his radar.
tripwolf was there in true start-up mode: While our much better financed American competitors like NileGuide, PlanetEye, Triporati or Travelmuse paid nearly 10,000 dollars each to hold a 10-minute-presentation and probably stayed at the overpriced conference hotel, Alex and I crashed on the floor of a friend’s place in the cool Echo Park neighborhood and sometimes shared one ticket to get into the venue. Ironically, it was a guy from Lonely Planet who sneaked us in – another big competitor who might not have noticed us yet 
At the conference it became clear once again how competitive the field is that we entered: A lot of the travel start-ups have very similar concepts. Stephen Joyce (who presented his very cool technology company Rezgo.com) even calls it the “the Battle of the Trip Planners“.
For now, as he points out, tripwolf is in the lead, together with uptake. Naturally, this makes us very proud! My bet is that uptake will also make a big impact down the road: Their take on Search Engine Optimization is very smart.
A “thumbs up” also goes to the gracious guys from TravelMuse who sat down for a chat and took a picture with us. The atmosphere was much more pleasant than in our meeting with Tripsay, a Finnish competitor we met at a conference in San Francisco last spring: Those guys looked as if they wanted to bite our heads off…
It was great also to finally meet all those bloggers in person who we got to know virtually over the last few months: Claude Benard from Hotel i Tour, Tim Hughes from The Boot, Stephen Joyce from TourismTechnology.rezgo.com , Kevin May from Travolution, Jeb Buhler from BuhlerWorks and Sean Keener from BootsNAll.com.
We brought back a full bag of partnerships from LA. We will announce over the coming weeks. And we are already looking forward to sneaking into the conference again next year!
Sebastian, tripwolf team
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3 Comments
I like your “feisty” startup attitude!
Stephen Joyce mentioned Tripwolf to us as well — sorry we didn’t have the chance to connect in L.A.
As for competitive stances: In today’s economy, we feel strongly that travel sites need to find ways to be complementary in the travel ecosystem, versus fighting amongst themselves for the same slice of pie. With over 9 billion travel searches a year, it’s a BIG pie . . . and there’s more than enough to go around.
Would love to hear more about your business. And for the record, we at UpTake will NOT bit your head off!
Thomas Brown
UpTake Networks
It seems that I need to practice my smiling. Guys in the office tell me that I look a bit like Ivan Draco from Rocky IV, so perhaps it’s just me and I always look like “I must crush you”. I’m sorry if you were scared that I’d bite your head off, that was by no means my intention.
Seriously, I thought it was a pretty pleasant meeting with you guys in SF, although our meetings with NileGuide, UpTake etc. were perhaps a bit warmer, perhaps due to american courtesy and the fact that at least one party was speaking in their native language. It takes two to tango.
Of course we Finns are not known for our big smiles or talkative attitude when meeting new people but had I really wanted to bite your heads off you probably would’ve noticed.
Was great to talk to you at PhoCusWright and see where you are going with the “hungry wolf”! I also stayed at a cheaper hotel but within walking distance – no taxi fare to pay either!
Happy Holidays!