TripAdvisor announced a significant partnership this week: the travel site will be fully integrated into the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 phones.
Reminiscent of
RIM's Blackberry Travel App, TripAdvisor will be pre-installed on each of these handsets, bringing the following features to users:
- Travel Widget – Designed to inspire, the Travel Widget will showcase TripAdvisor images of popular travel destinations and attractions. Users can touch the on-screen star icon to save places to their “Saves” list on TripAdvisor, or tap the image to see details in the TripAdvisor app, which include reviews, opinions, photos and contact information.
- Lock Screen Slideshow – When the phone enters “locked” mode, users can see travel photos of world destinations on the device’s high resolution screen.
- City Information in Samsung Story Album – Samsung Story Album builds a digital photo book by connecting travel content to user’s travel photos. TripAdvisor lets users add more enriched city information into the Story Album for browsing later.
As TripAdvisor expands and adds more tours and activities, this partnership could become even more lucrative for the company. Being included natively on the hardware is quite a competitive advantage, providing an in-built audience for the TripAdvisor family of services.
By being able to provide inspiration, reviews, and actual bookings in one place, TripAdvisor stands to gain more than just market share and relevance - opportunities to increase mobile revenue growth are much greater given this integration.
Mobile has been a boon to TripAdvisor: the company claims that the TripAdvisor's mobile app has seen over 30 million downloads to date. And with
S4 pre-sales already coming in at 5 times that of the S3, this integration is going to continue solidifying TripAdvisor's position in the mobile space.
TripAdvisor was unable to comment further about the impact of the partnership, beyond the following fodder from CEO Steve Kaufer:
We are delighted to be partnering with Samsung to preload the TripAdvisor mobile app on the new SamsungGALAXY S 4. The combination of more than 100 million TripAdvisor traveller reviews and opinions with our inspirational travel photos on the latest Samsung device will provide a perfect companion for modern travellers.
Samsung is also clearly happy with their partnership, as a way to provide users more value via the handset - and also to nicely recover from their previous attempt at building their own standalone TripAdvisor competitor called Tripper.
Chanwoo Park, Vice President of Product Strategy Team at Samsung
We wanted to ensure that Samsung GALAXY S 4 users can access up-to-date inspirational travel destinations, photos and insights. We are excited about our global partnership with TripAdvisor to fulfill our customers’ unmet needs and their enriched mobile experiences.
The financial terms of the partnership agreement were not disclosed.