Twelve months on from the acquisition, TripAdvisor's reason for buying Tripbod is beginning to take shape.
The company was bought for an undisclosed fee in May 2014, three months before TripAdvisor also snapped up tours and activities online agency Viator for $200 million.
The main Tripbod website was quietly relaunched in the past few weeks in a bid to focus on its "core strengths" - namely bringing locals to the front of consumer trip planning by tapping into their local knowledge.
As a result, Tripbod's activities service, which was in place pre-acquisition, has effectively been handed over to its larger stable mate.
The new service will work in tandem with the main TripAdvisor site by creating locally sourced travel guides, which then appear on the mothership.
TripAdvisor director of product and Tripbod founder, Sally Davey, says:
"Given Viator is also part of the TAMG family and the global leader in tours and activities, it made complete sense for us to work with Viator on distributing the local experience products that previously featured on the Tripbod marketplace, and concentrate our team’s energy in our trip planning products, which was where Tripbod began."
There are currently more than 7,300 travel guides covering 355 destinations around the world published on the main TripAdvisor platform, with a "high proportion" written by existing members of the Tripbod site.
Davey says:
"When we launched the new product we did so with curated guides for each destination, which are commissioned exclusively from the TripBod network and feature the wording 'Exclusively commissioned by TripAdvisor'.
Tripbod members produce a guide using the bespoke creation tools we built and each Guide is written to a detailed brief."
The plan is for the curated content to complement the thousands of community reviews and opinions on the TripAdvisor website.
The relaunch of the travel guides on TripAdvisor has coincided with it also inviting a "select group of contributors" to create their own guides for each destination, known as known "UGC Guides" (User Generated Content Guides).