Available in English Website www.virtualtourist.com | Parent TripAdvisor | |
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VirtualTourist (often written VT) was a free, travel-oriented community website featuring user-contributed travel guides for locations worldwide. VirtualTourist hosted content such as tips and reviews, online forums, sells advertising and provided travel booking or link to travel booking. Members of the general public were able to register on the site as a 'member' and use a number of the website's services at no cost.
Contents
VirtualTourist used social media techniques to enable a sense of community through its active travel forums. VTers regularly get together for face-to-face social events all over the world. For example, in May 2010, more than 150 VTers from around the world met in Krakow, Poland, for VT's 6th annual Euromeet.
The website had over a million registered members, providing 1.7 million travel reviews and 3.6 million photos on over 72,977 destinations.
In February 2017 Virtual Tourist was closed by its parent company.
History
The origin of Virtualtourist is found in a project at the University of Buffalo to provide a Web-based map of all servers on the Internet. This project was nominated for “Best Navigation Aid” at the Best of the Web Awards at the First World Wide Web Conference ever organized.
In 1996, Brandon Plewe at the University of Buffalo registered “Virtual Tourist” as a trademark in the US, but abandoned the trademark in 1997. Shortly thereafter, two German computer science students, Tilman Reissfelder and Thorsten Kalkbrenner at the University of Karlsruhe, picked up the URL with the intention of doing “something cool” with it, that something being no more precise at the time than creating a map of the world and providing places to put travel information.
By 1999, Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner had a site with a few hundred city locations with travel links that people could add to and which would reference their user profiles. The site, which had links about “Hotels, Restaurants, Things to Do”, was doing about 1.5 million page views per month from about 500,000 unique visitors.
In 1999, J.R. Johnson, an American attorney, met Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner. Together, they moved the company to the US, raised money, and relaunched Virtualtourist in late 1999 with Reissfelder as CTO and Johnson as CEO. During the 2000s, the website grew rapidly and won a number of awards and positive mentions in the mainstream press, from sources as disparate as PC Magazine, The Times, Travel and Leisure, and The Wall Street Journal.
In July 2008, VirtualTourist.com, Inc. and sister site Onetime were acquired by global Internet travel company Expedia (owners of Tripadvisor.com) for a reported $85 million.
On 6 January 2017 the parent company announced that VirtualTourist was closing down and that operations would cease as of 27 February.
Website features
Each destination page offers information on the local time and date, number of members living there, member tips, hotel reviews, must-see activities, restaurant reviews, local customs, nightlife, off-the-beaten path tips, tourist traps, warnings, transportation, packing lists, shopping, sports travel and general tips.
VT forums
VT offers several forums - a travel forum with a top-down structure to get to each destination, a 'miscellaneous' forum and a technical help forum.
Unlike Rick Steves's website, Tripadvisor, and Cruisecritic, VT has in practice only one 'miscellaneous' or non-destination specific forum (the technical help forum is very narrowly focused on questions about the website itself). Tripadvisor, for example, has some 35 non-destination specific forums. Having only one Miscellaneous Forum has the effect of forcing the entire VT community into one area, with the result that the VT member base tends to interact a great deal.
This leads to one of the biggest differentiators between the other travel websites and VT: the high number of face-to-face meetings that, while encouraged by VT, are largely put together by the members themselves.
Homepages
Members have their own travel pages with space displaying their personal writing and photographs. These homepages can be much more extensive in content when compared to the 'user profile' at Tripadvisor and other travel websites.
Top Ten lists
VirtualTourist takes advantage of its worldwide membership to periodically ask for "Top Ten" lists. These lists, humorous as well as informative, are routinely repeated in the press around the world.
On November 14, 2008, Reuters carried a story on VirtualTourist's list of the "World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and Monuments." Boston City Hall came in first place. Other top ten lists have included:
Recognition
Other reviews
Corriere della Sera (an Italian newspaper) listed VirtualTourist as one of the "big three" travel community websites in 2005 (along with TripAdvisor and Worldsurface). The newspaper commended VT for being easy to navigate, 'spartan,' equipped with a search engine to goes down to the smallest town, and really covering the world ("Facile da navigare, spartano, è dotato di un motore di ricerca che arriva alla città più piccola (esempio, Finale ligure) e copre davvero il mondo"). In addition, the paper advised Italian readers to evaluate the website by looking at the tips on their own hometowns.
In a September 2007 International Herald Tribune article about how online travel agencies like Orbitz.com were enabling the capability of users to add tips and helpful content like social networking travel websites, New York Times contributor Bob Tedeschi said, "As fast-growing as the new travel networking tools are (i.e., Orbitz.com and others), they have far to go before they challenge the category leaders, Yahoo Travel and VirtualTourist.com."