TravelPost.com
goSeek.com | Hotel Discounts, Deals, and Special Offers.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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TravelPost.com emerged in February 2004 as an early player in the online travel community space, founded by Sam Shank, a Kellogg School of Management graduate, and Sunil Shah. Initially conceived as a travel blogging platform, it allowed users to create online journals of their trips, complete with photos and stories. The site was among the first to enable users to map their travels online, a feature that predated its widespread adoption.
A significant evolution occurred in 2005 when the company secured $1 million in a Series A funding round from investors including Amicus Capital and Ron Conway. This capital injection facilitated a pivot towards a hotel review model, enhanced by licensed data from Market Metrix that allowed users to filter reviews by demographic. This strategic shift positioned TravelPost as a growing resource for user-generated hotel content. The business model focused on generating leads for travel suppliers rather than processing transactions directly.
The company's trajectory involved a series of acquisitions, reflecting the dynamic nature of the online travel industry. In October 2006, travel search company SideStep acquired TravelPost, integrating its rich user-generated content, which at the time included nearly 500,000 reviews and blogs, to enhance SideStep's own offerings. Just over a year later, in December 2007, Kayak.com acquired SideStep, and with it, the TravelPost platform. Under Kayak's ownership, TravelPost was relaunched in March 2009 as a hotel information site aggregating reviews and rates, directly competing with established players like TripAdvisor. The ownership changed hands again in the spring of 2010 when Kayak sold TravelPost to one of its board members, Greg Slyngstad.
Parallel to TravelPost's journey, the associated goseek.com brand was founded in 2014 by Clem Bason. GoSeek operates as a hotel metasearch engine that helps users find and compare hotel prices from various booking sites, also providing coupon codes for discounts. It functions as an information aggregator, redirecting users to book on other sites.
Keywords: TravelPost, goseek, Sam Shank, Sunil Shah, hotel reviews, travel blog, online travel community, SideStep, Kayak, user-generated content, hotel search engine, travel metasearch, hotel booking, travel technology, Clem Bason, travel aggregation, hotel ratings, travel journals, online travel agency, accommodation search