TripAdvisor is throwing its considerable weight into the mobile travel arena even further, illustrated today with the acquisition of user-led trip planning service Everytrail.
Terms of the deal for the California-based Everytrail were not disclosed.
TripAdvisor says the acquisition of Everytrail, its first buy in the mobile sector, will bolster its growing – and increasingly important – strategy to provide services to users on the move.
The Everytrail team will remain in Palo Alto and CEO Joost Schreve will continue to run the company as a business in its own right, similar to other acquisitions by TripAdvisor which have joined to form the TripAdvisor Media Group.
The core Everytrail product is a mobile-led service which allows users to record trips around a particular city or region using their mobile device and then share via the web platform.
Members can also add images and other details to each trip as they go along. The company says it has user generated trips created from 80 countries around the world.
The acquisition comes just 12 months after Everytrail took a $1 million round of finding from California-based Band of Angels.
Later in 2010 it signed a partnership with travel guide giant Fodors and launched its marketplace for users to buy downloadable travel guides to their mobiles.
TripAdvisor says it has no plans as yet to integrate Everytrail and its “tremendous technology” into the wider TripAdvisor network of sites.
But clearly the acquisition signals how much mobile is becoming a major part of TripAdvisor’s overall strategy, having launched smartphone and iPad apps over the past ten months and now muscling into the user generated content end of mobile travel.
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About Kevin May
Great move! Congrats to the Everytrail Team, you guys have been doing a fantastic job and deliver a great product.
Nice work & congrats. It’s a top app, best of class and extremely useful for map drawing and poi positioning. Just keep those Gpx downloads available please!
..interesting…let’s see what will happen with the class actions in due course in Italy, UK,and France.
This service will be offered throught the local umts providers….and those have to be compliant to european laws regarding legitimate contents and contents providers.
So will be quite funny “watching” the movie of Expedia-Tripadvisor facing the report to antitrust authorities of its EUROPEAN websites ( .it, .es, .fr etc etc ) being abusive. ( according to European Law 2008/88/CE of 12th February 2008 )
Sunny greetings
Alla Dolce Vita
Everything is going mobile. Great move TripAdvisor!
congrats to the everytrail team!