Here is perhaps a sign of the times as travel companies that invested in social media platforms a few years ago give in to the power of Facebook and Twitter.
STA Travel launched its STA Travelers online travel community in February 2007 but admits this week that the site was quietly closed six months ago.
Citing how other social networks were already doing the sharing elements of the STATravelers site, STA Travel says it wanted to focus on its existing presence in Facebook and Twitter.
The company's other social platform, STA Travel Blogs, which sits on the main STA Travel site, also allows a lot of the multimedia sharing tools that were built into the STATravelers.
According to freely available web analytics tools, volume of indexed pages and back-links started to take a tumble from the middle of 2009 until the site closed earlier this year.
Nevertheless, STATravelers ranked well for critical key search phrases such as "student travel" and "travel community" but appears to have suffered from simply not being the social network of choice for young and independent travellers, Facebook.
James Bell, commercial vice president for STA Travel, based in the US, says:
"We decided to close statravelers.com earlier this year to focus on our vibrant communities on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.statravel.com. We found that these platforms allowed our customers to share their travel experiences with us in the way they wanted to and statravelers.com was no longer necessary to help people share their trip stories, travel advice and photos."