Gogobot, The Travel Site Where Friends And Experts Plan Your Vacation, Is Growing Really Fast
It now has 3.7 million registered users and has become the fastest growing travel site on the web, according to data from Comstat and eMarketeer shared with us by cofounder and CEO Travis Katz.
In the summer-travel month of June, Gogobot was a more popular website than AirBnB, Bing Travel or Hipmunk, the data showed.
Granted, Gogobot is still less than half as popular as Frommer's and a fraction of the size of Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor. But it's also only 2.5 years old, Katz points out.
The site is popular because it helps you get travel recommendations from your own friends in your own social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Instead of posting a status and asking friends, "Hey, where's a great place to eat in Denver?" it automates the process.
If your friends can't help, or you are going to some exotic location, it has expert travel writers that can. Or you can join a "tribe" and trade tips with people who have similar travel tastes (adventure, budget, backpackers, foodies, history buffs, etc.)
Naturally, the site will book your reservations. Then it keeps a travel log for you, including your photos, favorite restaurants, etc.
And it does it all from your smartphone.
Before founding Gogobot, Katz formerly ran the international business for Myspace. Cofounder Ori Zaltzman was the chief architect of an innovative Yahoo search service, Yahoo BOSS, and worked on Yahoo Answers, too.
Gogobot has raised $19 million over two rounds from investors like Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.