History

TravelPost was founded in February 2004 by Sam Shank, a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management

Kellogg School of Management

The Kellogg School of Management is the business school of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, downtown Chicago, Illinois and Miami, Florida. Kellogg offers full-time, part-time, and executive programs, as well as partnering programs with schools in China, India, Hong Kong, Israel,...

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It was initially launched as a travel blogging site, where users could register and set up their own blog area, which acted as an online travel journal where people could write about their travels, or hotels, and upload photos. They were one of the first travel sites to allow people to plot where they'd traveled onto an online map, before the advent of Google Maps

Google Maps

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

 made this practice ubiquitous on travel sites. (Now other sites like WhereIveBeen.com and the Cities I've Visited feature on TripAdvisor do this.)

In 2005 they licensed hotel review data from Market Metrix and raised a $1M Series A led by Amicus Capital and various angel investors including members of the North Bay Angels and Ron Conway

Ron Conway

Ron Conway is an American angel investor, often described as one of the "super angels". Conway is recognized as a strong networker and is based in Silicon Valley.-Early career:...

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This partnership evolved the site into a hotel reviews site that allowed for filtering of reviews by reviewer demographic.

SideStep

SideStep

- Description :SideStep is a metasearch engine for travel: it searches and consolidates results from more than 200 travel websites. The site searches more than 150,000 hotels and 600 airlines in the United States and worldwide...

 acquired TravelPost in October 2006. The founder continued to operate the site for 15 months while at SideStep. He has since founded DealBase.com

DealBase.com

DealBase.com is a website that lists hotel packages in a consistent format so people can see the approximate savings that a hotel deal is providing. Contents of a hotel deal are broken out in itemized lists on their site...

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Kayak.com

Kayak.com

KAYAK is a technology company providing online travel tools through its global family of websites and mobile applications. Started by cofounders of Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, KAYAK allows users to compare information from hundreds of other travel websites in one display when booking travel...

 later acquired SideStep in December 2007 and took over the operations of the site.

In March 2009, Kayak.com relaunched TravelPost as a hotel information site, with hotel reviews and rates for hotels aggregated from several travel sites. This was regarded as an entry to a niche dominated by another hotel-reviews site, TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor.com is a travel website that assists customers in gathering travel information, posting reviews and opinions of travel-related content and engaging in interactive travel forums. It is part of the TripAdvisor Media Group, operated by Expedia, Inc. TripAdvisor is a pioneer of...

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In Spring 2010, KAYAK.com sold TravelPost to one of its board members Greg Slyngstad. The two companies continue to work very closely together.