Trippy is the place to get the best answers to your travel questions
Trippy is a question and answer travel site built by a community of travelers helping each other travel better. Along the way, Trippy aims to inspire and spread “helper joy” — that happy kick you get when someone else has a great experience thanks to advice you shared. Trippy launched as a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 Startup Battlefield.
J.R. Johnson is the founder and CEO of Trippy.com. From his earliest travels, he learned how transformative travel can be and how important it is to get the right answers at the right time. While in Madras, India, J.R. had a chance encounter with a fellow traveler at a hotel bar who suggested he forgo the popular Taj Mahal tour in favor of the Himalayas and Darjeeling. This was the “a-ha” moment for J.R. and his life has never been the same.
In 1999, he started VirtualTourist.com, the premier travel community of its time, and eventually sold it to Expedia/TripAdvisor in 2008. He continues to believe that we should use technology to push ourselves toward being more connected to the world around us. J.R. and his team passionately believe this, and that’s why they are building Trippy.
“Reviews are fine, but they lack a lot of context…You’re talking about your experiences related to a certain place you visited,” says Johnson of places like TripAdvisor in an interview on TechCrunch. “End users then have to try to determine how trustworthy the review is, and try to pick out the pieces that are relevant to them. A Q&A session is different as you can ask for a very specific piece of information and receive a list of answers in response.”