Social travel planning service Gogobot rolled out a new feature today which provides contextual search for users.
Dubbed "Gogobot Tribes," travelers can now select one or more travel styles that fit their search to narrow down selections and deliver more relevant, intelligent results for a particular search. Or, as the company puts it, "travel better, together."
There are 19 styles of travel initially, with others to be added as needed: Adventure Travelers, Art & Design Lovers, Backpackers, Budget Travelers, Business Travelers, Family Travelers, Foodies, Green Travelers, History Buffs, LGBT, Local Culture, Luxury Travelers, Outdoor Enthusiasts, Nightlife Lovers, Spiritual Seekers, Students, Trendsters, and Vegetarian/Wellness.
The experience is available both on the website and the mobile app.
Beyond the ability to sort experiences according to which Tribes like a particular place, travelers can sort according to tips left by people in specific tribes.
Gogobot explains how these specifics work:
"When searching for the perfect hotel, destination or activity during a holiday, a five-star rating might look appealing – but how to know if those five stars were assigned by a luxury traveler or a budget traveler? Or was a destination lowly rated because penny-inching backpackers repeatedly snubbed the same place that a business or luxury traveler loved?"
"Gogobot users planning a family trip to Paris can ignore the advice of nightlife lovers in favor of recommendations from other parents. A student traveler heading to New York City can get ideas from other budget travelers without the distraction and temptation of the luxury recommendations. Likewise, foodies heading to San Francisco can filter for the advice of fellow epicureans when looking for the best places to eat in San Francisco."
In addition to user-submitted tips and reviews, Tribes are supplemented by expert guides focused on particular Tribes.
One of the launch experts is Giada de Laurentiis, who published her tips to the Best Restaurants around the world in cities like LA, SF, Rome and Venice.
This is an interesting move by one of the original social travel planning and recommendation services (TLabs here). The company has been searching to find a scalable revenue foothold, with recent rollouts of hotel and restaurant bookings, in addition to content partnerships with other travel brands, like HomeAway, to bring some of the trip recommendations out of Gogobot and onto other platforms.
Beyond these partnerships, the new Tribes feature should allow for specific segmentation that for some solid platform-wide advertising possibilities.
Working with CVBs and DMOs on targeting specific travelers, placing sponsored recommendations for certain Tribe-recommended places, and deploying sponsored promotions and giveaways for targeted Tribe profiles could all be additional sources of revenue. These types of advertising move past the display ad and into a more integrated marketing approach that is more engaging for users, and more profitable for both the brand partners and company.
Here's a short company video about how Tribes integrates into the experience: