Travellerspoint se démarque des autres sites de social travel networking par sa grande facilité d'utilisation et ses fonctionnalités que je trouve bien pensé et qui facilite la création d'une "travel communauté".

Samuel Klingen Daams, co-fondateur avec son frère de Travellerspoint nous explique le fonctionnement du site et ses différences par rapport aux autres sites de social travel networking.

La dynamique de ces sites Internet Travel 2.0 est vraiment incroyable.

Découvrez son interview ci-dessous.

> Sam,can you tell some information about you?

I'm half Dutch, half American and grew up in the Solomon Islands. After moving back to the Netherlands as a teenager I chose to study and travel around Australia during university and having loved it, was lucky enough to land an internship in Sydney at a inbound travel provider. After graduating I started working in the travel industry in the Netherlands. I currently live in Oslo, Norway after meeting my wife, who is from Norway, while travelling.

>You are co-founder of a great travel 2.0 web site, a social travel network Travellerspoint. Can you tell us the story and some fact about it?

Over an online chat session in 2002 with my brother, co-founder Peter, we came up with the idea of creating a site where travellers could be reunited with old travel friends they had lost touch with. As travellers who had been travelling our entire lives, we had personal experience with this and it seemed like a simple idea that should work. At the time I was living in the Netherlands and Peter was (still is) living in Australia. What started as a mere discussion turned into serious planning and just three months later we launched Travellerspoint. Amazed, we found our humble little website turning into a rapidly growing travel community, getting great reviews and attracting thousands of new members.

Since then, the site has grown to more than 85,000 members from over 240 countries. It has become a travel community with several complementing services designed to assist travellers at all stages of their trip.

>Can you give us some outline about your goals with Travellerspoint !

I don't think our goal has ever changed very much from when it was originally drafted: "The goal of Travellerspoint is to create an international meeting point for travellers worldwide, whether they are planning their travels, currently travelling or have returned from their travels and want to stay in touch with (or find) those travel friends they met while travelling in the past."

We still work hard on a daily basis to continue adding features that fit into this goal.

> Who use Travellerspoint ? Any special profil and country for Travellerspoint group & community users?

As a primarily English site, members from English speaking countries are obviously more common, however Travellerspoint has members from over 240 countries (<242 at the time of writing this>; who have logged trips to 244 countries. The site is coded so that if you start a blog or a onlinediary it can be written in any language/alphabet, naturally a huge benefit for members from non English speaking countries. Overall, the site has a very international flavour and feel to it; something we try to focus on and develop as one of our unique features in comparison to most English travel sites that tend to be very targetted at the UK/US markets.

In terms of age, the majority of users is between 18 and 35 (about 65%).




>Any advises for people who start to use Travellerspoint!

Jump right in and forum , customize your home page with the parts of Travellerspoint you think you will use most and enjoy a friendly community of travellers helping each other out!

> What are the main advantage to use Travellerspoint compare TripHub, RealTravel and other travel social network?

Both of these sites, as well as many other 'travel social networks' that have popped up in the past year or two, offer great services and technology. Where TripHub focuses more on the organizing of group travel, most of these sites, like Travellerspoint, focus on the sharing of information by travellers albeit through blogs, diaries, forums, photos or reviews. Although these aspects are also important to Travellerspoint users, we strongly believe in offering services that can be used when travellers don't happen to be travelling or preparing for a trip. Features like helpersearch allow for travellers to volunteer to share their knowledge on a uniquely personal level and help keep a travel memory alive. Our travel-friends-reunited feature, the original basis for Travellerspoint, is also aimed at keeping travel memories alive for longer and assisting travellers in finding lost travel mates.

>Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0. What do you think about this evolution in the tourism & hotel market place ? Word-of-mouth marketing and User Generated Content are the big trends for Travel 2.0 ?

I think the evolution of the internet is nothing short of fantastic, regardless of the market place. For the tourism and hotel market place in particular though, where friends and family's travel experiences shared over a photo book have always served as an important planning resource, the Web 2.0 components come to a particularly suitable market for user interaction and sharing. As travel is the most popular market for affiliate programs (see http://travolution.blogspot.com/2007/02/travel-loves-affiliate-marketing.html), the user generated content and sharing can easily be tied in with relevant paid products and services to create an extra revenue stream for the underlying site. This makes popular travel sites much more versatile and able to handle downturns in the online advertising market easier than non travel counterparts that rely solely on for example Google adsense for revenue would.

Considering the margins involved in affiliate programs, if a travel site doesn't run its own booking engine, you really can't maintain a successful business model if you do not primarily rely on word-of-mouth for marketing and UGC for content. I expect travel sites that are currently burning through venture capital funding with no clear feel for these margins and the advertising potential, will be at the foundation of the Travel & Web 2.0 bubble bursting.

>We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, Google mashup,Vidéo etc), what is your point of view ?

It's just fantastic. I get so excited when I see new technologies like this at work! Imagine where we will be in 5 years?! These technologies are the true backbone of Web 2.0, it's just up to site owners to try and harness it into successful business models, much like was the case in Web 1.0.




>What about your developpment and project for Travellerspoint?

We've recently launched an advanced travel-maps feature which has proven very popular with members. There are still some improvements we can make to the system, amongst others to make it more 'sharable' across other sites. We're also working hard on redeveloping parts of our accommodation area and destinations area
Somewhere along the line we also hope to find the time to re-develop www.travelblogs.com, which our company purchased in 2006!

> Can DMO's and Tourism Board become Travellerspoint partners?.

We offer advertising packages that can be tailored to destination specific content and are always happy to partner with sites on a destination specific level as well.

>What are your personal taste for:

>Travel:

Travelling with my wife and daughter. I've grown old :)

>Travel destination:

I love travelling to Australia, for assorted reasons, amongst them our having an office there. If I could choose a favourite dream destination though, I'd have to say Antarctica (although my wife and daughter might not join me on that trip!).

>Hotel :

Depends on the trip, but anything with a good bed and a free internet connection suits me just fine!

>Business:

I admire businesses that start small, work hard at a great idea and make it big. How can you not admire that?!

>You have the micro

I'd like to congratulate my brother and co-founder with the birth of his first child, can link this :)