Proud to introduce Tripess.com version 1.0, improvements and new functionalities! And some insights…

The last few months, since our launch in February, we’ve been working on some mayor improvements. We listened very carefully to what our users came up with and we looked at the platform on we’re we would like to go in the near future. We defined a new and clear mission about what we want to achieve: Let you “Entering the world of serendipity”.

“Trip Essentials goes beyond search and entering the world of Serendipity (discovery). What’s the difference? Search is what you do when you’re looking for something. Serendipity is when something extraordinary that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you”.

I would also love to share some Analytics with you as well. Remember, we didn’t spend any money on (online) marketing! We’re amazed ourself’s that the website engages people and the amount of people using the website actively. Imagine if we would ever have enough money to spend on Online marketing .

An overview over one month*:

• 3.360 

Visitors

• 50.668 

Pageviews

• 15,08 

Pages per visitor

• 32,35% 

Bounc ratio

• 00:16:28 

Time on site

• 36,32% 

New visitors

*Feel free to publish these Analytics on you're blog. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third chapter of: How to do stuff @tripess. Today we’re going to show you how to push you’re activities directly to several social networks. We’re using the social network Twitter as an example.Trip Essentials also uses Twitter to communicate and push information about our developments. Make sure to follow us at www.twitter.com/tripess and we’ll even talk back to you .

Step 1
Login to you’re tripess account at www.tripess.com. Once you’re logged in choose [Profile] dropdown (don’t click on [profile] and then [Social networks] to start sharing you’re activities on Twitter.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second chapter of the: How to do stuff @tripess. Today we’re going to guide you through the add some friends to a trip procedure, so you can share you’re tripes with you’re friends. Once they accepted the invitation, they get acces to the trip you want to share with them and they can start adding some Hotels to that trip themselfs.

Step 1:
Login to you’re account at www.tripess.com. Once you’ve logged in, choose [my] from the above menu and than “My Trips“.

Step 2:
You will than see a complete overview of you’re planned trips. Choose one of these trips in the field on the right.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first chapter of the: How to do stuff @tripess. First we’re going to guide you through the register procedure, so you can create you’re personal member profile.

Step 1:
Go to the Trip Essentials website at www.tripess.com. Click on the [Register now] button at the homepage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trip Essentials goes beyond search and entering the world of Serendipity (discovery). What’s the difference? Search is what you do when you’re looking for something. Serendipity is when something extraordinary that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you.

Trip Essentials (TripEss) is an online Travel service designed to make your Travel experience more active and stimulating. Trip Essentials Travel service can help you, while you explore different Travel websites (e.a. lastminute, expedia, booking, hotels etc.) discover, save and share your future plans with friends, family, colleagues and locals.

Once you saved your favorite accommodations or hotels you can; -sort, compare, forward, etc. Trip Essentials also marks coincidences, for example two other people also visited this hotel or four other people from your friends network will be in Barcelona at that time too.

Trip Essentials has offices in an old fire department (Blushuis) in Breda, The Netherlands.

The international team behind Trip Essentials is led by founder CEO Gino Goossens, CCO Sjoerd van Oosten, partner E-Sites and partner Moore Intelligence.com. Trip Essentials is privately funded by the international team.

We launched a new mobile website at http://m.tripess.com especially for the Iphone. You can visit the mobile site with every mobile phone, but it look the best on an Iphone. This mobile website let’s you manage your complete Trip Essentials account. You can even create a new account!

Create your account.

Manage your account.

Add new tripes and manage your Tripsets.

Manage your friends and invite new friends.

View destinations and sort all your destination to compare and book.

Detailed information about destinations including: Weather, CO2 emission + edit, share and rate functionalities.

Real-time weather and Co2 emission information.

A list of all your selected destination/ accommodations with a detailed view option + ratings.

We love our new Tripess.com mobile website and we hope you will to! Please, keep giving us the feedback we’ve been receiving through e-mail or this blog! Soon hopefully also available in the Apple App-store…

To see all the screen photos, go to our Trip Essentials Flickr photo set.

Since our private beta release last Friday a lot of online and offline attention came over us. Some prominent blogs, magazines and newspapers approached us for interviews.

Frankwatching.nl is the number one weblog about Technology, Internet and Innovations in The Netherlands. They did a post about us.

We were even called ‘This year’s Dopplr’ on a weblog.

A journalist from the Amsterdam newspaper ‘Het Parool’ mentioned that “her Trip would have been completely different if she had used Trip Essentials and the Serendipity effect”.

Reisrevue announced us as a “Travel comparer with serendipity” and a welcome new website.

[update Saturday 14 February 2009] The #1 weblog DutchCowboys writes a post about Trip Essentials.

And many more…

Thank you all for your contributions and we hope we will meet your expectations.

As you might know, we want to integrate convenience and be able to communicate with our users. No matter were you are. So we created a Facebook group for you to show that you support us and tell your friends and family about us.

Through our blog, group and newsletter we would like to start the conversations with you on how we can make tripEss.com better, faster, more beautiful and functional for you.

These communication channels are also going to be where we will announce new features, developments, start-up hick-ups, fix problems etc. And we will talk about our philosophy behind tripEss.com, why we started the services and how we want to change the world with this Intelligent Travel service.

About: Trip Essentials (TripEss) is an online Travel service designed to make your Travel experience more active and stimulating. Trip Essentials Travel service can help you, while you explore different Travel websites (e.a. lastminute, expedia, booking, hotels etc.), save and share your future plans with friends, family, colleagues and locals.

What are you waiting for? Join us at Facebook!

Yesterday we received some great news! We are nominated by: ReisRevue and Green Travel Foundation for a Green Feather. The Travel Feather elections are one of the highest nominations a Travel initiative/company can receive in The Netherlands. We are nominated together with some of the biggest Travel companies in the world such as: KLM, TUI Travel PLC, OAD, Kuoni, etc. So we are really horned to receive a nomination for our contribution to create more ‘green awareness’ among Travelers across the globe.

Why? What did we do to deserve such a prestigious nomination?

There are two reasons why we got nominated:

1.) When people are using the service of Trip Essentials and add the favorite accommodations/ hotels to a tripset, we give CO2 emission kilogram information for different kind of ways people could travel; -by foot, bus, train, car or airplane.  This creates awareness and let people think about the way they could travel to their next destination. Also we keep track on how many miles/ kilometers people traveled and what the total CO2 emission is for different travel types.
2.) We give tips to business travelers to become more efficient to plan their business trips by recommending appointments in the same city. Travel & Serendipity creates this effect because it marks coincidences and shows you who lives or will be in that city the same time you will be there to. This way we create more awareness and the opportunity to save fuel, minimize CO2 emission and even to be more efficient in planning your next trip. In the near future we also should be able to tell who is the most environmentally aware travel organization in different ways of traveling around the globe (KLM, Oad, TUI, Expedia, Lastminute.com, …). Maybe even create our own award to give each year to the most environmentally aware travel organization in the world. So which Travel organization is able to sell the best mix of different ways to travel to a destination?

The award show is this Tuesday the 13th in Utrecht during the holiday grant profession day. We sure hope we stand a chance! Wish us luck!

Last Friday, 2 January 2009 we achieved a goal; our private beta version was finished and we launched it! Currently were testing all functionalities and aggregators to make sure that small problems are being solved before the ‘public private beta’ goes live. We have a select group of critics and trip.Ess enthusiasts who will receive a private beta invite. If we stay on schedule we expect to be sending the first private beta invites within two weeks.

Celebrating our moment at Trip Essentials office in Breda, The Netherlands
You can find more pictures about Trip Essentials here.

At this moment were pitching Trip Essentials to (private) investors/ venture capitalists to develop and market trip.Ess more and more the coming years. Investors who are intersted can always send me and e-mail (ginogoossens[at]gmail[dot]com) or call me at +31 (0)6-24115440. Will continue giving updates on developments as well; -things were struggling with as a start-up and how we solved and faced problems the last year and coming years.

Were getting a lot of support and most people we talk to about trip.Ess are really enthusiastic about the service and can’t wait to start using it. Well same here! We can’t wait to introduce trip.Ess to you!