VirtualTourist (VT) was a free online

travel guide A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place designed for the use of visitors or tourists". It will usually include information about sights, accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of varying det ...

and

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

. The website had over 1.3 million members, which contributed to sharing 3.7 million photos and posted 1.8 million travel tips for over 70,000 locations. Members were able to rate each other's tips by accuracy and helpfulness. Each member had a "VT rank" based on the ratings of their tips. Some members attended meetings, which often included over 100 participants. The company also provided "Top 10 lists" based on rankings by its members, including "10 of world's most unusual foods", "Top 10 European Cities To See Now", and "Best Street Art". The site earned honors including recommended travel forum by ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'', a favorite website by ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis (businessman), Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print m ...

'', and one of the 35 best travel sites by ''

Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Co. (formerly Wyndham Destinations, Inc. and Wyndham Worldwide Corporation) is an American timeshare company headquartered in Orlando, Florida. It develops, sells, and manages timeshare properties under several vacation ownershi ...

''. Effective February 27, 2017, the site was shut down.

History

The origin of Virtualtourist is found in a project at the University of Buffalo to provide a Web-based map of all servers on the Internet. This project was nominated for “Best Navigation Aid” at the Best of the Web Awards at the

First International Conference on the World-Wide Web The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (also known as WWW1) was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, ...

. In 1996, Brandon Plewe at the University of Buffalo registered “Virtual Tourist” as a trademark in the US, but abandoned the trademark in 1997. Shortly thereafter, two German computer science students, Tilman Reissfelder and Thorsten Kalkbrenner at the University of Karlsruhe, registered the URL. By 1999, Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner had a site with a few hundred city locations with travel links that people could add to and which would reference their user profiles. The site, which had links about “Hotels, Restaurants, Things to Do”, received 1.5 million page views per month from about 500,000 unique visitors. J.R. Johnson, an American attorney, teamed up with Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner, moved the company to the US, raised money, with Reissfelder as CTO and Johnson as CEO. The website launched in January 2000 at the peak of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

. In 2007, the company launched VirtualTourist Travel Guides, printed guidebooks composed almost entirely of

user-generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

. In July 2008, VirtualTourist.com, Inc. and sister site Onetime were acquired by

Expedia Group Expedia Group, Inc. is an American online travel shopping company for consumer and small business travel. Its websites, which are primarily Travel website#Fare aggregators and metasearch engines, travel fare aggregators and travel metasearch eng ...

(then owner of TripAdvisor) for $85 million. In September 2012, the company announced a partnership whereby it would provide perks to travelers with

Contiki Tours Contiki is a New Zealand tour company that caters to 18- to 35-year-olds. It operates tours in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, Africa, Middle East and Asia. It is a subsidiary of The Travel Corporation. Its tours h ...

who posted about their experiences on the website. Effective February 27, 2017, the site was shut down.

References

{{Reflist Tripadvisor American travel websites Internet properties disestablished in 2017 Internet properties established in 1999 1999 establishments in the United States