TripConnect Announces Launch of New Travel Website That Harnesses Power of Personal Networks;...

NEW YORK -- TripConnect today announced the launch of its Website -- www.tripconnect.com. TripConnect is a travel web site that enables people to easily exchange travel advice with their friends and their network of acquaintances. TripConnect is the only travel site to harness the power of a persons

"Most people seek travel advice from friends and family or others with similar tastes and interests," says TripConnect founder and CEO Carter Nicholas. "But there's a problem: people are unaware of where even their closest friends have traveled, let alone friends of friends who could be experts on the place you want to go. Our site lifts the fog that otherwise covers this information."

The site leverages the rapidly growing phenomenon of online social networking for the process of travel and destination research. With TripConnect, people are able to "link" to their friends and acquaintances, and see where their friends, (and friends of their friends) have traveled. People can then consult their network, and reviews on destinations and hotels written by people in network are presented first.

The effect is a very efficient and powerful research tool that allows people to get great information on thousands of destinations through their network. By way of example, the average TripConnect member is linked to ten people, each of these in turn is linked to ten more. Each of those people, in turn, has listed on average 30 places that they have been. What this means is that a TripConnect member can immediately see that they have a friend or friend of friend who has traveled to almost anywhere in the world.

"It's amazing what TripConnect revealed to me," said James Orford, a new member of the site. "If you had asked me a week ago whether I knew anyone who had been to Acadia National Park, I would not have been able to come up with a single name. I look on TripConnect, and I see 25 friends and friends of friends who have been there and are willing to give me advice."

"Social networking used in this way helps you discover all the previously hidden knowledge that exists in your network of friends, information that otherwise would be very difficult or time consuming to find," says Nicholas. "Not only are we making vacation planning a lot more efficient, allowing people to cut through all the generic and anonymous sources of online info, we are also making it more fun. Through TripConnect, people reconnect with friends in the process of planning their getaways."

About TripConnect

Founded in 2004 by Carter Nicholas and Isaac Sacolick, previously senior management team members at DoubleClick and PowerOne Media, TripConnect is based in New York City, TripConnect, Inc. is an online service that allows people to get travel advice from people they know, others who share similar interests, and also from established and relevant information sources. The company's mission is to help people with the process of choosing travel destinations and hotels by presenting them with the most useful sources of information: those that they trust and those that are most relevant to their tastes and interests.