Since launching in November 2010, social travel startup Gogobot has been on a mission to remove the shoddy design and link farm tendencies from the old world of online travel discovery. Because travel research should be a visual experience, from the get-go Gogobot focused on collecting and curating quality photos from the world’s many travel destinations.
Supporting its visual approach, Gogobot founder Travis Katz says, Gogobot wants to be Lonely Planet 2.0, a mobile and online publication that functions as a resource for trusted travel advice, both from experts and friends. In pursuit of this goal, today Gogobot is announcing that it will be teaming up with Travel + Leisure to bring its 2.5 million registered users a streaming feed of the publication’s best photos, reviews and destinations.
Gogobot has already built out a social foundation, allowing people to write their own reviews of their favorite destinations — using their real identities to add a layer of trust. By teaming up with Travel + Leisure, Gogobot is building out the other half — content and recommendations from experts and trusted names in the travel space.
Katz says that, thus far one of Gogobot’s most popular mobile features has been its digital postcards, which provide a visual look into top travel destinations by way of its repository of user-generated images — and through a partnership with Flipboard. Now, Gogobot will be doing the same with Travel + Leisure content, posting a stream of digital, thematic guides culled from T+L’s content.
Travel + Leisure will also be posting their picks for the best and hotels and destinations into Gogobot via mobile and will allow users to follow them to keep track of their picks or check out those thematic guides. On top of that, their reviews of hotels and resorts will begin appearing on Gogobot’s topic pages alongside user reviews. Again, this allows Gogobot to complement the crowdsourced travel knowledge and content from its 2.5 million users with a trusted editorial perspective.
The partnership with Travel + Leisure follows Gogobot’s addition of realtime hotel pricing, OpenTable integration and 360-degree looks via Google Street View integration, which enables users to check out restaurants and neighborhoods at a potential travel destination both from the outside and the interior. More in our prior coverage here.
