DG WORD

Essentially, TripOutlet.com is a place to find really, truly great travel deals.  It’s only fitting that the current slogan is “Because everybody loves travel deals”.

It’s TripOutlet’s raison d’être - TripOutlet’s reason for being.

How TripOutlet Works
Travel companies (wholesalers, retailers, whoever) with websites will benefit from the increased exposure their online inventory receives from TripOutlet.  They are welcome to submit their own content to the site weekly, daily, hourly - it’s up to them.  And it’s all free.

General visitors are also capable and welcome to submit deals they find online.  Think of it as the ultimate friends & family deal list.

All deals are automatically approved to the site but, given the democratic model, every user has the right to vote on deals.  So we’re going to get bad deals submitted - and users will vote it down with the ‘No deal’ button.  But we’ll also get great deals, which will rise to the top and appear on Page 1.

So What Makes TripOutlet A Great Site For Consumers?
Aside from having access to the best travel deals (as voted by other users), we’ve put the visitor first by designing everything with one thing in mind: user experience.  We want consumers to come to the site and enjoy their time here.  We keep out of their hair with the ads so as not to overwhelm them.  We stay friendly with the interface and wordings.

Maybe most importantly, we offer one great service and we do it really, really well.
Consumers will appreciate the refined simplicity of it while also loving the numerous features we’ve incorporated to make their experience that much better.  Here are some of those features:

• Easy sorting to find the perfect deal.  By default, deals are sorted by votes (popularity) but all visitors have the ability to sort by newest, price or votes
• Easy searching.  Along with easy sorting, visitors can enter a search (ie. Mexico) and the list will be filtered for their search, which they can then sort by either newest, price or votes.  Searching is not limited to geography.  Any search string can be entered and if any deal has that string in it, a result will be displayed (ie. “golf”)

Extended features that require registration + login:

• Saving searches.  Any time a user performs an action (search, sort) they will have the ability to save that action for later use.  For instance, if a user searches Bali and sorts the results by price, they can click “bookmark this search” right above the deal list and it will save that search to their bookmarks.  They can then revisit the site at a later date, go to their bookmarks and click ‘cheapest deals to/from Bali’ and it will display up-to-date results
• RSS feeds.  Users have the ability to create their own custom RSS feeds.  This allows them to create specific feeds based on whatever criteria they wish (ie. most popular deals to mexico) and display the results either on their website(s) or in their RSS reader.  TripOutlet deals will also be syndicated to TripAtlas and other Diamond Group web properties.
• User preferences.  Each logged in user has the ability to modify their account.  They can specify a default sort type (newest, price or votes), a default search string (in case they only ever want to see deals of a particular type)
• TripOutlet newsletter.  The details of this one are still being hammered out, but essentially users will be able to get travel deals sent to the email address they supply us with.

Now, from a business perspective…

Page 1 Travel Deals
Page 1 Travel Deals are the deals displayed on the homepage because they’re the most popular, according to the TripOutlet user community.  It’s the equivalent to a weekly Top 10 list except it’s accurate up to the minute.  Visitors can be relatively assured that if something’s sitting at the top spot on Page 1, it’s likely that it’s really a deal.

Premium Real Estate
There are two main ad units for sale: leaderboard (728×90) and bigbox (300×250).  Basic browsing of the site guarantees ad exposure 100% of the time as there is no ‘fold’ where the user scrolls to an area where ads are no longer visible.  The exception is when a visitor is viewing a deal with many comments (they click the deal, then on ‘comments’).  We will be integrating ads into these pages in the near future.

Cutting Edge Technology, Better User Experience
Also, we’re using AJAX - a sort of ‘instant feedback’ technology - on the site (you click sort by price and the list instantly sorts instead of the entire page refreshing) and as a result, the number of page loads will be reduced.  However, the length of visit per user should be higher than average.

A New Online Advertising Model
The combination of Increased length of visit and maximum ad exposure means that the two ad units we currently have are going to be very valuable pieces of real estate when we have significant traffic (which shouldn’t take long).  Advertisers with rich media ads would most likely see the biggest benefit from this model - and, as always, advertisers needing rich media banner design know who to talk to.

So that’s TripOutlet in a nutshell.

It’s brand new and bound to “miss” a thing or two - but it’s guaranteed to only get better with time and support from everybody here and all of you out there.

So tell your friends about TripOutlet - better yet, submit travel deals you find and share them with your friends and help this great new site grow.