@Darren- Are you more a fan of communities that integrate with existing technology like facebook and Twitter?

The web is swamped with websites (hey, I run 2 so I’m just as guilty!) and many of them are duplicates of others. Yes, travellers love to share their experience but seriously, how many communities do you want to join?

I am a member of a few forums, social networks and communities but I cannot remember the last time I was inclined to use any of them.

Thanks for your review of vtravelled. It’s great to read that your impressions are positive overall, and I think your summary of the challenges ahead are pretty spot on.

It’s worth mentioning now that we’re just embarking on a fairly major review of where we are at the moment, what we’ve learned so far and how we can apply that to the next round of development. It’s been about five months since we launched and we have a load of really useful and insightful feedback to take forward. Exactly as you’ve picked up on in your post, Trip Pods and the vtravelled community are a main focus right now – for the very reasons you describe – so stay tuned for news on some major improvements in the coming months.

I would just like to slightly correct a couple of your points if I may, because I think it’s important when talking about UGC communities: you are totally right in your assertion that communities which run purely on UGC have to have quality information, and a large initial quantity of information in order to succeed. However, vtravelled is not actually a pure UGC site, and this is one of the areas where we feel we can differentiate ourselves from the crowded market. Our ‘Inspiration’ section comprises editorial articles that are commissioned, and are written by professional writers and travel journalists, and our destination guides are a mixture of user-contributed reviews and licensed 3rd party content (for the more ‘dry’ information such as passport/visa requirements, how to get there, etc). This spread of the factual info and the authoritative and expert knowledge from our writers sitting *alongside* UGC is what [we believe] makes us a more well-rounded site for online travel inspiration, and gives people a reason to come to us in the first place.

As you say, building a new community is a huge task – we’re under no illusions about this – but one thing we know for certain is that passionate travellers love to share… so we need to help them do that as easily as possible. Hopefully the improvements we’re working on today will help us to nurture one of the most engaged travel communities of tomorrow.

Maxine Sheppard
Editor – vtravelled.com