Itinerary management service Wipolo, headquartered in Paris with ten employees, has seen 1,000% year-on-year growth fuelled by both its social and partnership strategies.
We covered Wipolo in a recent TLabs Showcase and, by the look of it, something is working very well. CEO and founder Matthieu Heslouin shares the latest news and vision for their solution.
Starting with social, Wipolo has achieved a very deep Facebook integration in a number of areas - although it was necessary to play around with it for nine months to test, measure, understand and focus on how to do it.
The first step has been leveraging Facebook Connect to ease access and login into the platform, both on web and mobile.
Heslouin says:
"We did not expect this, but the fact that people are permanently logged on on FB makes the transition into Wipolo a login-less process, which is extremely important on mobile where any typo can be a roadblock and frustrate the user forever."
The second area is with sharing itinerary and updates going on walls semi-automatically, so that friends can be kept posted about a user's wherabouts, and interact at any time.
And Facebook has also turned out to be a huge source of data - with friends, pictures, places and events being available for enhancing the user's experience during a trip.
"Facebook wants to replicate the platform success achieved with gaming onto other verticals, like music and travel, and is shaping the platform in new ways to appeal to these sectors."
The Wipolo team is expected to unveil a newly revamped website later this month, with social integration pushed even further.
Another key area of development is making it easier for partners to integrate with the Wipolo itinerary management service. For example, French OTA GoVoyages (now merging with Opodo and eDreams) now offers an option to seamlessly integrate a booking with the Wipolo platform as a value-add service to users.
The vision is very ambitious. With access to a user's trip history and preferences, Wipolo can create a "travel graph" linking a user to destinations, friends and travel providers.
This data will soon make it possible to predict the most likely travel needs, and Wipolo's partners will be able to proactively generate relevant travel offers without the user even having to start a search.
While other itinerary management apps like TripIt, WorldMate and TripCase have focused on business travel as their target segment, Wipolo has quickly embraced social with the goal of becoming the leading leisure itinerary management solution.
Currently available in English and French, the service will soon be available in German and Spanish.