VirtualTourist
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| Available in | English |
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| Parent | TripAdvisor |
| Website | www |
VirtualTourist is a free, travel-oriented community website featuring user-contributed travel guides for locations worldwide. VirtualTourist (often written VT) is one of a number of travel websites on the Web, which include websites like TripAdvisor (VT's parent company) and Cruise Critic (a sister company to VT). VirtualTourist hosts content such as tips and reviews, online forums, sells advertising and provides travel booking or link to travel booking. Because VirtualTourist derives its revenue from advertising and selling ancillary services, the general public is able to register on the site as a 'member' and use a number of the website's services at no cost.
VirtualTourist uses social media techniques to provide not just content for travel issues, but to enable a sense of community through its active travel forums. VTers regularly get together for face-to-face social events all over the world. For example, in May 2010, more than 150 VTers from around the world met in Krakow, Poland, for VT's 6th annual Euromeet.
With over a million registered members, the website offers 1.7 million travel reviews and 3.6 million photos on over 72,977 destinations.
The origin of Virtualtourist is found in a project at the University of Buffalo to provide a Web-based map of all servers on the Internet. This project was nominated for “Best Navigation Aid” at the Best of the Web Awards at the First World Wide Web Conference ever organized.
In 1996, Brandon Plewe at the University of Buffalo registered “Virtual Tourist” as a trademark in the US, but abandoned the trademark in 1997. Shortly thereafter, two German computer science students, Tilman Reissfelder and Thorsten Kalkbrenner at the University of Karlsruhe, picked up the URL with the intention of doing “something cool” with it, that something being no more precise at the time than creating a map of the world and providing places to put travel information.
By 1999, Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner had a site with a few hundred city locations with travel links that people could add to and which would reference their user profiles. The site, which had links about “Hotels, Restaurants, Things to Do”, was doing about 1.5 million page views per month from about 500,000 unique visitors.
In 1999, J.R. Johnson, an American attorney, met Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner. Together, they moved the company to the US, raised money, and relaunched Virtualtourist in late 1999 with Reissfelder as CTO and Johnson as CEO. During the 2000s, the website grew rapidly and won a number of awards and positive mentions in the mainstream press, from sources as disparate as PC Magazine, The Times, Travel and Leisure, and The Wall Street Journal.
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