Jetpac, the friend-powered travel inspiration source, launches today creating personalized travel tips from the habits and photos of your friends. While most recommendation services require reviews or check-ins, Jetpac uses the photos and information that have already been shared, giving it 100 times more information than others.
The company is based on the premise that friends and connections provide a better source of inspiration and recommendation than travel brochures or strangers. However, only a tiny minority of people take the time to write reviews, so there has been limited information to work from.
Jetpac turn photos into check-ins and automatically determines location, what kind of place and activity they involve, and whether the experience is recommended. Because it uses information already shared by friends, new Jetpac users immediately have tens of thousands of inspiring photos and recommendations on popular travel spots to look at immediately, without having to ask a question.
Jetpac co-Founder and CEO Julian Green: “More than three quarters of Facebook members upload photos and comments from vacations, which could make Facebook the greatest travel guide in history. But it’s totally unstructured, until now. With Jetpac, Facebook becomes a travel guide written just for you by people you know and trust – or at least know not to trust in some cases!”
“The $100billion online travel industry is not inspiring travellers and is facing the next phase of disruption. Phase 1 was cheap deals via the web, phase 2 was reviews and recommendations, which has led to information overload and people gaming the system. Jetpac heralds a new phase, where reviews are drawn from people you trust simply from the information they already share. Travellers are getting tired of searching, and Jetpac is the solution,” he added.
“Jetpac takes you directly to the best travel spots based on what you like and where you’re friends have been, in a beautifully visual experience that actually gets you excited about traveling.”
The company, which plans to release an iPad app in the next two months, used its proprietary algorithms to identify locations and activities for 50million photos that had been shared with users in its private beta period.
