As you’ve noticed by now, Triporama totally and completely made over our service this Memorial Day Weekend. Since we promised to be 100% truthful and direct with you, our wonderful user, we’d like to share some of what we went through, warts and all, to get here.
Overall, the feedback has been very positive, even from some of our toughest critics – our own friends and families. But some have felt that maybe it’s just too late to bring Triporama back to a relevant service. That the group travel space is not as active and defined as we believe and that our trip planner isn’t as robust as some of the others out there. Additionally we (really I, Wendell) made a few mistakes during the launch that potentially alienated some of our users too. I’ll go into that in a bit.
To begin with, I am well aware that opinions are opinions and I also know that we will simply not be able to make everyone happy with us, and that’s okay. Triporama is built for a highly specific niche – friends and family travelers. That niche is broken down into: Girlfriend Getaways, The Guys Trip, and Multiple Couples/Families who plan their travel together from two or more computers. These specific groups will be taking a wide variety of trips to a wide variety of locations – from Weekend Road Trips, to Disney Vacations to Surfing Adventures in Sumatra and just about everything in between. Average group size using Triporama is about 8 to 10 people.
We also know that your group will come to Triporama with a unique set of criteria for planning. Loyalty points with specific providers, need to pay with multiple credit cards, know exactly when you want to travel or don’t, searching for info or knowing it all, a first time trip or annual adventure. Our design goal is: make our Trip Planner so groups are able to encompass all of these potential data sets. That’s why on Triporama you’ll see suggested tasks, bookmarking, timeline, tips, but also a wide-open dashboard and itinerary builder for “ad-hoc” planning.
It will be up to you all to decide if this is still a relevant venture. But please know that we are listening very closely (via feedback, not Facebook stalking stuff) to what you want and how you want to use our service. All/every/any piece of feedback is welcome at any time and I will respond personally.
Next, I made some mistakes in our announcement email – we used the wrong subject line and we sent the same email multiple times in some cases… this is really bad and kept me up all night. No excuse here except to let you know that we are updating our email service (the goal was to make it less messy) and things got…messy. It may have been too important to me to get Triporama re-launched over Memorial Day which is a special day personally because of my dad and it is also the kick-off to summer travel. Lastly, I have let a typo slip through in our re-launch Press Release. If you can find it and then send me what it is to support@triporama.com, I’ll send you back a free Triporama T-shirt (include your shipping address, pls.)
As an avid group traveler myself I pledge here that I won’t give up until I’ve cracked the code of providing you with the best service to make planning your group’s trip as much fun as taking it. This objective may take longer than I expect to achieve (this re-launch went on 4 months past our original goal), but I will continue to engage, write, and above all listen to you, our fellow travelers.
Thanks and honestly I hope you love us like crazy. But if you don’t, I will keep at it until you do. That would be creepy if we were a couple, but since we’re travelers, I think it is totally appropriate and crucial for the success of the entire group – AKA all of us.
Thanks and happy travels (together).
.
Wendell Willat
Co-founder | Chief Culture Officer
Recent Comments