Further to my posting about WAYN I learned about TripHub.com, which helps users organize trips with their friends and family.  It combines travel research facilities, blogging capabilities, and invitation tracking (like Evite) into one easy interface.  The site allows users to shop for hotels, flights, and activities and share this information with others.

There’s an important distinction between sites like WAYN and TripHub.  While WAYN focuses on “chance encounters” and helping users find travel partners, TripHub allows users to interact with those who are already in their network of friends and familiy and organize the details of a trip with a specific list of invited participants.

TripHub features a very easy, well designed user-interface and integrates with leading travel sites like Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity, which makes organizing the various aspects of trips within the US easy.  Users planning trips outside of the US, will still find TripHub useful for communicating with prospective and confirmed travel groups, but digging on external sites for foreign hotels is required, as Hotels.com, only allows users to search for hotels located in the states.

While I think that TripHub is a neat site as-is, there is room for the incorporation of additional social networking features.   Namely, I’d like to see users be able to post personal profiles and search for like-minded people who are looking for specific types of travel partners that are going on trips to particular locations.  For example, it would be great if users could post their profile on TripHub and ensure that only a specific demographic could see it and connect: (i.e: men and/or women between X and Y ages, located within Y miles of X city in Y state and Z country, looking to take a X day long vacation, costing between $X,000-$Y,000 to one of the following “wish list” locations (by city, country, or continent, etc.).  Alternatively, it would be great to see TripHub partner up with WAYN or a similar site to allow users to find travel partners and then plan trips accordingly.  I’d also like to see TripHub integrate with an international photo-sharing and printing site so that users can share pictures from their trips and the option to order each other’s photo books after the trip.

If you’ve used TripHub before, please post a comment with your thoughts.  If you’re a non-VOXer, and would like to post a comment, send me an email with your comments, and I’ll post them on-line: socialmediablog@gmail.com.