Gil Ruda, CEO of Trip Touch, answered questions that AdMarkTech has asked relating to the technology and the marketing behind the travel startup:

What was the thinking behind Trip Touch and how was the original idea conceived?

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 travelers 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.

What is the principle of the technology behind Trip Touch?

We’ve created a platform that aggregates local and worldwide travel content and services into a location-based database.
We integrate now more than a dozen sources.

Other than TripTouch.com we syndicate our information via Widgets, Email and co-branded or white-label sites.

We’ve built the widget using the UWA Netvibes technology.

How can advertisers interact and benefit from Trip Touch?

TripTouch main focus is around destinations, so advertisers can target their ads to specific locations.

Most of our users are either just before or during a trip, so they are eager for relevant information and ready to make transactions.

What is the revenue model?

One of the advantages in the online travel domain is that revenue models are well established: targeted ads and commissions from travel bookings.

What areas do you plan to expand upon?

We plan to expand in few dimensions.

First, we are improving the content by adding more suppliers for content and services.

Secondly, we plan to improve the UI and add more useful features.

We plan to add more platforms by which users can enjoy our services.

Are there plans to go into other languages?

We chose to start with English as a common grounds for TripTouch. We plan to add more languages in the future as a part of improving our personalization .

What are the demographics of the current site users?

The leaders are: USA, Israel, UK, India, Canada and Australia.

How are you marketing Trip Touch?

• We are combining few marketing strategies.
• We use guerrilla marketing to promote TripTouch on forums, blogs and social networks.
• We are collaborating with with travel related service providers both online and off-line.
• Also we get traffic from search engines, at this time mainly long tail searches.