Tripwolf & Boo

Basically Tripwolf and Boo are social travel guides (community business model) and trip planners. They help travelers to share their expectations, experiences and recommendations.
If you plan a travel and don’t know what you will find or what to do during tour trip, these websites will help you find people who went there and contact them. Once you have returned, you can post your experiences so other travelers can benefit from them.

For the customers, the advantage is to have useful tips about their future travels. They can also contribute by advising other future travelers and share their memories. Through these websites, they can also plan in advance their trip, book their flight and find cars to rent or hotels. They can also learn the language! To resume, the traveler can plan entirely his future trip with this website.

The partner can make his business known in a large traveler community. If its product has a link to traveling, he will be called upon by a future traveler. The advantage is the clarity of these websites. When a traveler prepare his trip outside of Tripwolf or Boo, he will not think of everything. But if he passes through on of these websites, he will see what he needs (even if he doesn’t really need it!) and will click on the link. This is where the partner makes his revenue.

The owners, by using the community business model, makes himself known through the traveler community. With this, businesses will be interested to be referenced on their website and a partnership can be contracted. This a good source of revenue for Tripwolf or Boo.

The interest of either of these websites is, for the traveler, the rapidity and efficiency of the links to the partners websites. Such a service can be practised offline but it won’t be as efficient. Plus, the travelers won’t have the community at their disposal.
To resume, this kinf of service is only viable online.

Tripwolf and Boo are two websites based on the community business model. Now, from Michael Rappa, the community business model suits the Internet and is today one of the most fertile areas of development. For this kind of model, revenue can be based on the sale of ancillary products and services or voluntary contributions. It can also be tied to advertising and subscriptions for premium services.
So the services proposed by Tripwolf and Boo are both sustainable and scaleable.

Tripwolf and Boo only go so far for the travelers. You can book your flight, you hotel, your car and even some of the tours. But neither of these website propose an all-planed trip, a kind of trip where the traveler don’t need to ask himself anything. Everything is planed.
With this in mind, you can imagine a planer on the websites where travelers program their trip: what kind of hotel, what kind of car, what kind of event, of food, of museums… Everything could be planed and once it is decided, the websites could charge it as a package trip.
With this method, the websites could think of a “special partnership deal” where the planer, a kind of software, could use directly the services of a partner (car rental or museum tours for exemple). This could represent another source of revenue: the normal partnership versus the priviledged one.

As for the community business model, there is many users for this model: facebook, meetic, linkedin…
www.linkedin.com
www.meetic.fr