Gogobot’s First Big iPhone Upgrade Gives Users A Mobile, Friendsourced Trip Planner

With the social travel space booming, it behooves the players in the space not to do too much smelling of the roses. Social travel planning startup Gogobot has found some early adoption and buzz, winning a Crunchie for Best Design and was named one of the best 50 websites of 2011 by Time. The site launched as a place people could go to share reviews on their favorite destinations — like Yelp for travel — but quickly began adding features, including Facebook and Twitter signup and integration, game mechanics and rewards (badges and leaderboards), launched a good-looking iOS app, within a few months last year, leading to a $15 million series A raise in November.

The startup then went on to leverage its user-generated database of travel photos in a partnership with Flipboard to turn those photos into sleek, geo-tagged postcards, like a travel scrapbook. Yet, since launching its iPhone app in October, Gogobot has pretty much left its sole mobile app alone, doing a number of small releases focused on speed and performance.

That is changing today, as Gogobot has launched its first major upgrade to its iPhone app, which looks to add to the app's utility as a social travel planner. Gogobot CEO Travis Katz tells us that, initially the team figured that users wanted to do most of their travel planning on their desktops, and use mobile to navigate their trips and share their experiences. But user feedback showed the opposite — that people want to plan their trip, explore, and share while on the go.

So the new Gogobot mobile now allows users to plan their entire trips to one of more than 60,000 travel destinations, based on recommendations from friends and those with similar interests. Users can browse reviews and photos of hotels, restaurants, and attractions (which Gogobot sorts based on their popularity within your personal network), picking and choosing from the best options to create their own travel plan. They then get instant access to maps and directions, phone numbers, hours of operation, making reservations at restaurants and booking hotels rooms right from the app.

Once they get back home, Gogobot users can surf through the photos of friends and family who are on the go, with Gogobot collecting those images into postcards. According to Katz, this has become one of Gogobot's most popular features, and has also received an upgrade, now offering users access to two postcard styles which can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email.

Gogobot users can still add places and write reviews to their Gogobot passport while on the go, but browsing the best things to do, and adding those places they like to their trip plan are great new features while you're maneuvering about on your vacation. It's also pretty huge that Gogobot sorts the top places in any city, based on your own personal network, so if your friends have been to a specific hotel or city, Gogobot will show those friendsourced recommendations first. If you don't, it sorts them based on popularity, and always surfaces the reviews that have personal relevance within your network first. For example, this is the passport Gogobot created for Katz, without doing any work.

And just for a sense of how far the startup has come? TripAdvisor, by all accounts the largest player in the space, which went public in December and grew revenues to $137 million in February, comes up short of Gogobot in monthly active users, according to AppData. Behind in dailies, but keep in mind that's just for Facebook data, only a portion of Gogobot's user base.

You can find the updated app in the App Store here.