Tripbirds Relaunches as Social Hotel Booking Site

• Tripbirds, the hottest start-up in Stockholm according to WIRED magazine, relaunches as the first hotel booking site based on Instagram and Facebook
• Tripbirds helps you book hotels with a little help from your friends

STOCKHOLM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tripbirds today announces the relaunch of Tripbirds.com as a social hotel-booking site. The website combines a ‘traditional’ list of hotels with information from your social network. It allows you to see where your Facebook friends have stayed, ask them for their recommendations and also gives you the ‘unofficial picture’ of a hotel through Instagram photos.

“According to a recent survey over half of Facebook users said their friends' photos influenced their travel plans. We want to make it easy for you to instantly access valuable information about hotels that exists amongst your Facebook friends.”

Tripbirds enables you to create a shortlist of places to stay and share it with friends on Twitter and Facebook. Users can also discuss hotel features within its website via a chat system. This makes it easier for you to co-ordinate your booking with co-travellers and get feedback from people in your social network before making decisions.

Ted Valentin, co-founder Tripbirds comments: "According to a recent survey over half of Facebook users said their friends' photos influenced their travel plans. We want to make it easy for you to instantly access valuable information about hotels that exists amongst your Facebook friends.

“You can also compare official hotel images side by side with images from Instagram. Official images look great, but Instagram photos capture a moment and often paint a better picture of the atmosphere at a hotel.”

Fredrik Cassel at Creandum, comments: “Online hotel bookings is a multi-billion dollar market. Social media is fundamentally changing how internet users are researching and booking hotels. Joining social data with existing data about hotels makes perfect sense. There are lots of travel and hotel booking sites out there but still a lot of room for innovation.”

Venture capital companies Index Ventures, Passion Capital, Creandum and angel investors Andreas Ehn (ex CTO at Spotify, and co-founder of Wrapp), Peter Read, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud founders) and Dave Morin (Path founder) back Tripbirds and provided its seed funding in late 2011.

To use Tripbirds please visit the website and connect using your Facebook account.

About Tripbirds

Tripbirds – the hottest start-up in Stockholm, Sweden, according to WIRED magazine – was co-founded in 2011 by a team of local entrepreneurs including Ted Valentin, founder of 24hbc.com, Sweden's largest hackaton.

Tripbirds has received a round of seed funding and is backed by Index Ventures, Passion Capital, Creandum and angel investors Andreas Ehn (ex CTO at Spotify and co-founder at Wrapp), Peter Read, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud founders) and Dave Morin (Path founder).

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