TripAdvisor Acquires Virtual Tourist And Online Booker OneTime
This story was written by Joseph Weisenthal.
TripAdvisor, the travel review site owned by Expedia, has made two acquisitions: VirtualTourist, a user-gen travel site, and OneTime, a travel comparison site. Both were founded by J.R. Johnson and operate out of Manhattan Beach, CA. Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed. VirtualTourist is a pretty similar concept to TripAdvisor. Basically, it's a community site for travellers, offering reviews and searches of hotels and the like organized by city. OneTime is a pretty spare search site touting cheap hotel and airline bookings, Basically, this looks like a landgrab, an attempt to add more users and views to the TripAdvisor network. There are no plans to really integrate the offerings or redirect the domains. VirtualTourist and OneTime will operate under the same management, and employees will be retained at the same location. It's claimed that both companies run profitably through advertising, though they're not offering anything more specific. Release.
By Joseph Weisenthal