TripTouch, interview with Gil Ruda

Dossier archivé l'Interview du Pro le February 29, 2008

TripTouch is a travel mashup for independent travelers centered around your location and your personalized travel tastes

Gil Ruda tel us more in this interview.

> Gil, can you tell some information about you and the TripTouch team.

The seed of TripTouch was planted in a one month trip I took to New Zealand in early 2006. During that trip I noticed from my experience and from other travellers I met that the solutions on the web for travelers on the go were not sufficient. On the long flights back home I sketched on a piece of paper a few ideas. When I came back I've done some studying and found out that there is a business opportunity and decided to start a startup to implement those ideas. Then I had the luck to find more people who believed in this idea and wanted to be a part of it, or invest, or just give good advice.

> Can you give us some outline about your goals with TripTouch?

Our goals for this year is to build an active community of travellers who use TripTouch whenever and wherever they travel.
In few years we hope to be a world leader for the travel online content/ community services.

> Do you have a target audience ? Because the global travel social market seems saturated!

While most travel sites focus exclusively on pre-trip planning, TripTouch is aimed primarily at the needs of independent travellers during their trip . Every year hundreds of millions of young people travel for a relatively long trips without planning too much and without booking ahead, and the needs of this market are clearly under served: finding what they really need in an overflow of scattered information is frustrating.
We believe that our concept of a personalized location based travel homepage is the answer for that need.

> TripTouch is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Do you see in your country other start-up in the travel market? How it's work for young entrepreneurs in Israel?

At this stage being based in Israel is fine. We approach worldwide audiences and not specific markets like the US. Israelis love to travel so we get very important feedback here. The Israeli web ecosystem is very supporting for startups these days.

> Tourism is a people business and a destination experience with personal encounters. Do you think the community can leverage a destination or a product thanks a web site and tools like TripTouch?

This is exactly the reason why we decided to create TripTouch- to leverage the travel experience by offering a useful tool for travellers with up to date information, services and a location based community.

> What are your taste for:

Travel: I the past I used to loved only cities, but that has changed. I still love the action of London and New York but now I also enjoy the nature and the calmness of remote places.

Travel destination: Planet Earth.

Hotel : Usually the hotel is not the important part of my personal travel experience. Though I have good memories from a visit to Provence where we stayed (and dined) in castles (Relais et Chateaux).

Thanks,

Gil Ruda
www.triptouch.com