[Austria] Social travel guide tripwolf.com has announced a deeper long-term partnership with travel book publisher Footprint. Both companies are increasing their existing partnership (so far limited to only a couple of countries) with a full syndication of Footprint’s travel guide books. The deal entails the digitization and import of 60 print travel books, consisting of 150,000 points of interest worldwide, which adds onto tripwolf’s exiting 500,000 POIs.
The content from Footprint hasn’t been published online before. The process of scanning and importing was enabled by a semantic-extraction-tool, specifically created for this deal. The content, in addition to User generated content and Marco Polo’s content will be available on Footprints own website, the tripwolf iPhone app and on the tripwolf.com Website. The latter one closes the circle of print to online by providing downloadable, free PDF guides, much like Offbeat guides is doing with external content providers.
Travel startups regularly compete over this kind of content, so it’s a reasonably big coup for tripwolf.
Marco Polo, an established travel guide player and subsidiary of Mair Dumont, is tripwolf’s other content provider. Mair Dumont, along with Angel Dieter von Holtzbrinck and Austrian incubator i5invest, are also shareholders of tripwolf.
The Footprint move is an interesting one to note from the persective of a traditional travel book publisher moving into online. In this case though, it’s rather a “merge” than a move.
