TripAdvisor Acquires Two Hot Travel Sites

TripAdvisor has been looking for even more consolidation within the travel industry on the internet, and on Tuesday, July 1st they announced that they have acquired 2 hot travel sites, VirtualTourist.com, a travel content network generated by users, and OneTime.com, a comparison site for travel bookings.  The TripAdvisor Media Network is an Expedia operating company that encompasses about 32 million visitors every month now.  Steve Kaufer, TripAdvisor’s founder and CEO is ecstatic about the new addition of the community that VirtualTourist will bring, because they are the pioneer of the online travel community concept.

Both of these new online additions claim to profitably operate from online ad revenue generation, and there aren’t any plans in place for the web domains or the businesses to be integrated together.  Instead, the general manager of VirtualTourist, Giampiero Ambrosi, and the general manager of OneTime, Dena Yahya, will keep running their businesses as usual and report everything to Kaufer.  Plus, all of the employees of these 2 companies will continue to stay in Manhattan Beach, where the companies are based.  J.R. Johnson, VirtualTourist’s and OneTime’s founder and chairman, said that he hopes to have an increase of growth with this combination.

InterActiveCorp of Barry Diller agreed to the purchase of TripAdvisor in 2004 in order to uphold the travel properties that they already had, which include Hotwire, Expedia, and Hotels.com.  Now, TripAdvisor is included of many other networks, such as AirFareWatchdog.com, CruiseCritic.com, IndependentTraveler.com, SeatGuru.com, Travel-Library.com, BookingBuddy.com, HolidayWatchdog.com, SmarterTravel.com, TravelPod.com, and now OneTime.com and VirtualTourist.com.

To look at the services offered by TripAdvisor, visit www.tripadvisor.com