This article was published on January 7, 2009

TVTrip: The Hotel Video Guide


TVTrip: The Hotel Video Guide

picture-51TVTrip is essentially a hotel search engine. Yawn right? Well not quite, it’s actually both interesting and informative. TV Trip focuses almost exclusively on video to showcase hotels from across the globe.

Working with hotels, they send you on a guided tour of the hotel (not virtual tour by the way) and do their best to show you interiors, exteriors and everything in between! Currently the hotels are mainly Europe focused, however they are expanding and fast, clearly with the goal to have covered hotels on every corner of the world by the end of it.

Launched in June 2007 with headquarters in Belgium, the startup is founded by four executives of Expedia Europe – clearly the experience is there. Plus, they have the backing of renown VCs in Partech and Balderton.

TVtrip’s features include member reviews, interactive maps, links to booking sites, average room rates, photos and detailed hotel descriptions. To book however you need to navigate to one of the sites partners which include Expedia and Booking.com, fortunately they’re just a click away.

One noticeable issue could be videos becoming out of date, when a hotel renovates for example. I’m certain the sites founders will have considered the issue but one other startup may have found the solution to that particular problem, TVtrip’s main competitor tripr.tv. Tripr.tv is a very similar concept but focuses on user generated content rather than hiring their own staff to record the videos, it then compensates users by paying 33% of their commissions for every booking made via their contributed video. Other competitors also include Trivop and Travelistic.

Unfortunately you can’t embed any of TVtrip’s videos on other sites, however, if you click on the image below it’ll direct you to a good example of their video tours.

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