Virtual Tourist Examined After TripAdvisor Acquisition
July 17th, 2008 by TJ Mahony tj@flipkey.comA few weeks ago TripAdvisor announced it had acquired VirtualTourist.com. I will admit that I was not particularly familiar with VirtualTourist (VT), so I jumped on the site to see what they were all about.
After a brief investigation I realized that I “should have” known who VirtualTourist was.
Summary of Observations:
Based on Compete.com statistics the site attracts ~1M visitors/month. I consider 1M visitors the qualifier for “I’m a major site.” I’m ashamed that I wasn’t aware of the site prior to the announcement.
I’m going to Asheville, NC for a wedding in August and figured I would see what VT had to say about it. I was surprised to find a significant amount of tips, tricks and photos of avid VT users who had clearly spent a ton of time reviewing the area. Although the site has some user experience quirks, the user generated content featured is robust and very useful.
I then decided to register and discovered why users spend so much time talking about the trips. VT actually ranks users based on the volume and quality of the content they post. Their user-community basically competes to have a high “VT Rank” and thus members go the extra mile to upload extra pictures, videos, tips and deals.
Although VT had some great content on Asheville, I did notice it fell short in many other vacation rental destinations. For instance, a search for “Outer Banks” and “Grand Strand” yielded no results. With that said, I found excellent content for a number of other vacation rental destinations.
VT allows you to register as a resident of your area and then allows people to contact you if they are looking for recommendations. With 1M visitors per month on this site, managers would be well served to register, use their local knowledge to enter useful tips, photos of nearby attractions and highlight the availability and advantages of vacation rentals in the area.