Triporama est un site de Travel 2.0 qui vous offre un ensemble d'outil pour meiux préparer vos voyages.

Triporama provides a free web site designed to make leisure travel planning easier for friends and family group travel. Triporama's Group Trip Planner reduces the substantial burden faced by groups by simplifying the process of collaborating on all aspects of planning a trip, including sharing travel research, determining travel dates, and coordinating on travel details.

Wendell Willat nous en dit plus dans cet interview et nous donne son avis sur les tendances du travel 2.0

A voir aussi le Triporama's Travel Provider Network™ pour les professionnels du tourisme qui désirent faire des opérations marketing avec Triporama.

Wendell, can you tell us some information about you?

Sure, I think my interest in travel began at an early age as I'm the youngest of six children and by the time I came along, my parents decided that instead of going to Disneyland and camping we'd go on family trips to the Panama Canal, Europe, and Mexico.

Also, I come from a long line of inventors and entrepreneurs. Most notably, my grandfather, Alfred Willat who invented the cold permanent wave as well as an engine that ran on water. I live here in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and three year old son.

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

Thank you for saying so. Triporama began out of what I've come to learn is a very common problem. I was trying to put together a trip with some of my friends that lived in other cities. The entire process, from keeping up on e-mails, to locating the right travel supplier, to finding a deal for a group our size ended up being so difficult it stopped us from going on the trip. It occurred to me that there must be a better way. I contacted my business-savvy brother-in-law who knew some talented people in the Internet industry, all of whom had experienced similar problems planning a group trip. We've been at this ever since.

Can you give us some outline about your goals with Triporama?

Triporama aims to make the process of planning a group trip, from idea, to collaboration, to departure, as fun and easy as the trip itself. Of course we want our business to be wildly successful, but we believe that, above all, we need to offer a great service. Our Group Trip Planner is designed to help the group leader as much as possible, particularly by getting others in the group involved in the trip planning. One of our goals is to maintain an intuitive and easy to use site that provides the information and tools necessary for putting together all aspects of group travel. Finally, we want to enable groups to be able to find the best possible travel supplier, if they need one.

Who uses Triporama? Any special profile and country for Triporama groups & community users?

Triporama users are people who enjoy spending time and sharing travel experiences with their friends and family. , such as weekend getaways, activity-based trips such as skiing and golf, cruises, sporting events, and other leisure travel. Groups range in size but most are about 6 to 8 members.

Triporama was originally created for North American travelers, but recently we have seen a nice spike in European users (particularly in England, Norway, and France). We particularly appreciate our European users' tremendous sense of community around travel.

Any advice for people starting to use Triporama.

We created the Group Trip Planner to be an easy to use, flexible companion to other online travel sites for research and booking. We really encourage our users to shop, compare, and become a good travel consumer. Triporama allows groups to plan, organize, collaborate and finalize all aspects of their trip. In particular, new users should try the Triporama Bookmark browser button, which makes it easy to save research from anywhere on the web "on the fly" and automatically share it with their group. Our Group Travel Guide is a good place to start research, too, with group focused deals, information, and recommendations on travel suppliers who specialize in group travel.

The 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?

I believe it is a natural, necessary, and positive evolution. Both "2.0" and travel equal community to me. As my father once told me planning a family trip to Russia in 1986, "nothing fosters community like travel." And it's through this community that "Travel 2.0," is empowering travelers, by quickly providing highly relevant advice, reviews, and information.

Word-of-mouth marketing and User Generated Content are the big trends for Travel 2.0?

Yes, and I feel that this is fantastic for the travel industry as well. User content to me is democracy in action. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but with the travel customer having such a strong voice now and so many outlets, it forces the industry to stay current and provide the best product. Tripadvisor has had a big impact on hotel bookings, for example. I'm looking forward to seeing video play a larger role in the next phase of user generated travel content and reviews.

We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, Google mashup,Vidéo etc), what is your point of view? Do you plan to use more Web 2.0 stuff on Triporama?

Yes, in fact the new releases of our Group Trip Planner, starting with our recent update at the end of January and again in our next big update in early March, involve additional Web 2.0 technologies. Ultimately, our goal is to build a service that lets users choose which tools are best for them then Triporama can organize and help share these new technologies while integrating them specifically for trip planning.




What about your development and project for Triporama?

In addition to further extending group travel collaboration based on our own ideas as well as feedback from our users, we are looking for better ways to integrate travel research, trip ideas, deals, and suggested travel providers into the Group Trip Planner.

Can DMO's and Tourism Boards become Triporama Partners or Travel Providers?

Absolutely, in fact I like to think of Triporama as a kind of DMO for travel providers who specialize, or have the ability to specialize, in groups. Triporama wants group organizers to find the best travel provider to fulfill their travel requirements. So, if a Tourism Board or DMO wants to bring its expertise, quality customer experience, and relationship with suppliers to work with Triporama, they are welcome to contact me directly at any time.

What are your personal tastes for:

Travel:
I need to do more. We've been working 24/7 to make other people's travel easier and ironically I haven't been on vacation for awhile.

Travel destination:
I'll always have wanderlust for Italy, especially the hill towns between Sienna and Florence, which is where my wife and I were married. As far as where I'd like to visit for the first time, it's New Zealand, as well as the Galapagos.

Hotel:
It really comes down to great service at a reasonable rate.

Business:
I'm always looking for companies, especially in the travel industry, who work hard to be on the cutting edge of new ways to better serve their customer.