TravBuddy

» see travbuddy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

travbuddy was built for a kind of traveler i was not, at least not in the years it was alive. it assumed you were the sort of person who flew somewhere alone and wanted to find a stranger going to the same city that same week, then split a hostel and a train ticket. in my twenties in turkey that was not how travel worked or how money worked, and the site's whole world ran in english, aimed at the backpacker circuit i watched from outside.

two brothers, eric and david bjorndahl, launched it in 2005. it did the honest version of a travel community. you found someone heading where you were heading, and you kept a blog of your trips with the photos and hostel reviews stacking up behind you. by 2013 it had nearly 470,000 members and millions of photos, a real archive of a lot of people's best weeks.

it died on the twenty-third of april 2018, and the cause was the dull one that takes most of these sites. it was not a scandal or a buyout, just a site that never made enough to pay for its own servers and upkeep, run by people who eventually could not keep subsidizing it. members scattered to travellerspoint and a few smaller forums. thirteen years of trip logs went quiet in a single afternoon.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the thing worth remembering is what a personal blog on travbuddy actually held. not a highlight reel for an audience, but a plain record kept mostly for yourself. this hostel was bad, this border crossing took six hours. that flavor of travel writing, plain and unglamorous, mostly moved to instagram and got prettier and emptier in the move.

~ the postmortem ~

there was no dramatic finish, which is its own kind of sad. the owners posted that it was closing, gave people a short window, and then the servers went off. the community had guessed it was coming, the site had felt unmaintained for a while, and revenue never matched what a photo-heavy site costs to keep online. what killed travbuddy is what quietly kills most of the mid-size web. it got too expensive to run for love and was never quite a business.

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