TripAdvisor Puts Your Friends’ Travel Recs All In One Place

When putting together an itinerary for your upcoming travels, planning can get…overwhelming. With so many resources out there, it’s hard to determine which hotel and restaurant suggestions are legit, even if they come from trustworthy sites.

Sometimes, the best recs come from close friends and family who know us best and vice-versa. If your self-proclaimed foodie cousin endorses an eatery, you’re there in a heartbeat. If your best friend suggests a hostile in a town you’ve never been to, you feel confident to book.

And now, TripAdvisor is trying to make that sharing experience a whole lot easier with their new travel feed, which will be rolling out later this year. Essentially a social media platform, this tool works toward “inspiring and empowering individuals with social assistive tools to plan an book better from people and experts they trust,” according to a press release.

Once the tool is live, users will see their homepage transform into a personalized feed, similar to what you see on Facebook and Instagram. From there, members can follow their close friends and family as well as favorite brands, narrowing down the flow of travel content.

When it comes time to plan a trip, users can search a particular destination, and the feed automatically filters to content relevant to that location. It might be a friend’s previous experience at a restaurant or your favorite influencer’s review of a hotel, but the travel inspo will be from sources you hand-selected.

Not only does this travel feed work to help users plan their next trip, but it can also be used spontaneously. For example, you could grab a bite to eat at a restaurant in Paris and then suddenly, you get notified that your friend previously checked in at the bar down the street. Expect the unexpected!

This is an effort from TripAdvisor to become more crucial in the trip planning process. And when it comes trust-worthiness, they know that Mom (or sister…or friend.) knows best.