Skift Take

Gogobot has attracted a lot of funding and appears to have some staying power, but when was the last time you or your neighbor used a social trip-planning service to plan a trip? Unitl Gogobot can really walk the walk, a dose of modesty might be in order.

Gogobot spawned social travel, conquered the competition, and now is dictating how TripAdvisor develops its own social features.

That analysis comes from Gogobot, of course.

In fact, according to Gogobot co-founder and CEO Travis Katz, Gogobot now dictates TripAdvisor’s development roadmap for social features, and TripAdvisor, with its $5 billion market cap, has recently “gotten faster at copying” Gogobot’s innovations.

Katz shared his analysis at PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit today, where he was interviewed on stage by Travel Weekly editor-in-chief Arnie Weissmann. The conversation turned to Gogobot’s also-ran status at the 2010 TIS, which was won by SilverRail Technologies.

Katz noted that despite Gogobot’s “inauspicious” start as a presenter that year, it had already been funded, and in the interim has been “very well-received in Silicon Valley.” Indeed, Gogobot has attracted about $19 million in venture capital funding, although modesty seems in short supply.

The Gogobot founder says in the wake of the company’s appearance at TIS in 2010, it spawned about 20 other social travel companies, although “most have gone away.”

Founded in 2010, Gogobot is several times larger than its nearest competitor, Katz points out.

After the TIS interview today, Katz was asked to cite some of Gogobot’s innovations.

“We launched a whole suite of tools today on Gogobot that makes the utility much deeper, including real-time pricing and availability from Booking.com, DealRank technology from DealAngel to help me quickly find the best deals, 360 panoramic street view integration from Google so I can check out the neighborhood around my hotel, and OpenTable integration to make it easier to book a restaurant with a single click.”

The company is not larger than TripAdvisor, however, and it is clear that Gogobot longs to be mentioned in any TripAdvisor conversation.

It is clear to Katz — although he didn’t state it — that officials from TripAdvisor, which posted net income of $59.4 million in the third quarter, must spend many sleepless nights worried about Gogobot and its inevitable ascension.

There was no word about Gogobot’s financials and burn rate, however, during the short interview, and nothing uttered about turning wine into water.

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Tags: gogobot, social media, tripadvisor

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