VirtualTourist

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

~ the goodbye ~

i missed virtualtourist. the platform's user base was concentrated in europe and north america, mostly people who took multiple international flights a year and wanted a place to swap tips about hotel districts in barcelona or which ryokan in kyoto was worth the yen. for a turkish engineering student on ttnet in the mid-2000s who did not travel like that yet, it was a name that showed up in coverage of travel-startups rather than a site i logged into. in those days.

anyway, tilman reissfelder and thorsten kalkbrenner registered the virtualtourist.com domain in 1996 while they were students at the university of karlsruhe. they did not launch the actual community site until january 2000, with j.r. johnson brought on as ceo to move the operation to the united states. the pitch was simple, a travel guide written not by lonely planet editors but by whichever local member happened to live in the city you were about to visit.

the community grew slowly and stayed niche. at peak in the late 2000s it had about 1.3 million members. they had shared 3.7 million photos and 1.8 million travel tips covering roughly seventy thousand locations. the site kept a member-rating system for tips based on whether other travelers found them accurate. that was a genuinely novel model in those days, most travel content on the web then was either editorial or open-guestbook style.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

the model was contributor-driven. each member had a profile with a list of places visited, a photo album per trip and tips written for other members planning to go there. the tips got upvoted or downvoted for accuracy. i saw this pattern later replicated by tripadvisor reviews and by yelp, but virtualtourist was one of the earlier services to run it at any scale.

there was also a real-world layer. members organized meetups in cities they were traveling through. sometimes with a hundred people showing up in a paris cafe on a saturday for a group of strangers who had exchanged forum messages about barcelona lodging. in 2007 the site started printing user-generated guidebooks that pooled the top-rated tips into a physical volume you could actually take on a trip.

~ the decline ~

the cracks were structural. tripadvisor, which expedia group had acquired the same year it bought virtualtourist in july 2008, was already the bigger travel-review brand and grew faster. the eighty-five million dollar acquisition was more about consolidating the category than betting on virtualtourist as a long-term winner. tripadvisor got spun back out of expedia in 2011 and kept virtualtourist as a side property but never invested much in it.

the sub-brand ran in maintenance mode for years. the interface stayed at 2008-era standards. really though, the community shrank as members drifted to instagram for photo-sharing and to tripadvisor itself for reviews. by 2016 the site was still up but the tip flow had slowed to a trickle and the meetups had mostly stopped happening.

~ what came after ~

tripadvisor announced the closure in late january 2017 and set 27 february 2017 as the cutoff. members could download their tips and photos before the deadline but the accounts themselves would not be migrated. what died with the site was the community layer. the tips got absorbed indirectly into tripadvisor's own database where they no longer carried the original author's rank. the meetups were the harder loss, no travel platform since has really tried to build the offline gathering layer at the same volume.

i was not around this world at the time. still, the pattern is worth noting. virtualtourist was one of the first services to prove that travel content works better when it is written by someone who lived through the trip. really though. that lesson got absorbed into every review-based travel platform since. the specific site that proved it is gone.

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