Stephen Kaufer, CEO and co-founder of TripAdvisor. The online leisure travel market is estimated to be a $30 billion industry by 2003, according to Forrester Research. While several established web sites provide online reservation and booking systems, no single site yet fufills consumers’ needs to research information on a given destination. In contrast, TripAdvisor provides consumers with an effective means to harness all the great travel information that exists on the web today, including authoritative reviews, bulletin board postings, personal home pages, and user opinions.
"We see a new trend in the market place for specialized vertical search companies," said Edwin M. Kania, Jr., Managing Partner at OneLiberty Ventures. "The web has grown too large for today’s generic search engines to effectively index and sort certain types of web based information. We believe the largest e-commerce segments need specialized search engines to help consumers locate web-based information as part of their purchase process. At $7.8 billion, leisure travel was the largest e-commerce segment last year. We feel TripAdvisor is superbly positioned to take advantage of this market opportunity."
TripAdvisor is licensing this innovative search technology to major web sites and travel service providers and will launch at www.tripadvisor.comthis fall. To learn more about featuring TripAdvisor on your web site, contact .
