Traxo seeks to eliminate fake travel reviews

Fake

NOWADAYS, travelers rely heavily on online reviews contributed by other travelers to make purchase decision about hotels and lodging. Often the choice between two hotels can come down to the number of 5-star or 1-star reviews one hotel has over another or sometimes it’s a genuine, authentic and well balanced review that a traveler identifies with that sways their decision. Because of this, the stakes are high and there is quite an incentive for companies to cheat in order to gain an advantage in the online travel review space. To game the system, companies often write fake positive travel reviews for themselves or even commission third parties to write glowing fake reviews on their behalf (also known as ‘touts’ or the practice of ‘touting’). On the other hand, even the good actors that follow the rules can be sabotaged by fake reviews that are written or created by their competitors.

To help combat this situation Traxo has launched the industry’s first ‘verified reviews’ platform for hotels and flights that ensures reviews are written by real travelers who have stayed at the hotel or flown the flight they are reviewing. All travel reviews that are written by a traveler with a confirmed travel booking are labeled as ‘verified’ by Traxo. Traxo automatically detect bookings made on major travel websites. Users can also forward their confirmation emails to Traxo to have their trip information collected and stored. Once the user returns from their trip, they are prompted by Traxo to write a ‘verified’ review.

Other industries have turned to purchase verification-type systems like Amazon’s Verified Purchase program. Even in the travel space, other companies have taken similar approaches to address this problem. For instance Expedia and USA Today’s new HotelMe, have started to make progress to address the fake review dilemma, but their solutions are highly limited. Expedia offers verified reviews through only the companies they own, but if travelers book other parts of their trips on other sites like Priceline or Orbitz, they would have to hopscotch around the Web to try to find those reviews. AlsoHotelMe’s verified reviews only come from a handful of participating hotels, and only when booked directly on the hotels’ websites. In comparison, Traxo recognizes bookings from most major travel websites.

You can search for and read Traxo verified reviews at: https://traxo.com/reviews.

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Traxo Adds Support for 20 New Sites

You asked and we listened! In order to allow our users to conveniently track all of the points and miles that they’ve worked hard to earn, we’ve just added support for the twenty new websites below. With the addition of these new sites, Traxo now supports a grand total of 190 websites. You can see the full list of supported sites or link a new site to your Traxo account here.

Our Newly Added Websites:

Brussels Airlines
Montenegro Airlines (Vision Team)
Royal Air Maroc (Safar Flyer)
Air Nigeria (EagleFlier)
Era Alaska (FlyAway Rewards)
Jet2.com (My Jet2)
Ural Airlines (Wings)
Air Italy (Hi-Fly)
Disney Cruise Line (Castaway Club)
Carnival Cruises (VIFP Club)
Azamara Cruises
OneTwoTrip
RIU Hotels & Resorts (Club RIU)
CLUBHOTEL
Trump Card (Privileges Program)
SNCF (Voyageur)
RBC Rewards
Royal Caribbean Visa Card (Rewards)
Maximiles
AIRMILES Opinions Panel by Research Now

If you have a website that you would like us to add, please contact us with the name of the website.

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GoMiles.com members, Welcome to the Traxo Family!

We are pleased to announce that Traxo has joined forces with our friends at GoMiles, another fantastic website that also provides tools and services to frequent travelers. All GoMiles users have been automatically migrated to Traxo, and can begin taking advantage of Traxo’s extensive trip organization and frequent flyer mileage protection tools, effective immediately. GoMiles users will be able to continue to manage their frequent flyer accounts in the usual way but will also be able to tap into Traxo’s suite of travel organization tools and start building their Traxo Travel Score.

“We are excited about integrating the unique capabilities of GoMiles into Traxo, and are committed to serving GoMiles users with the high level of service that they have come to expect,” said Andres Fabris, CEO of Traxo.

“We know this is an opportunity to deliver even greater value to GoMiles users” said Michael Komarnitsky, CEO of GoMiles. “Traxo’s trip-organization capabilities are unmatched in the industry, and GoMiles users will be able to leverage these features to take more control of their trips and their frequent flyer miles.”

To get started, GoMiles members can obtain a new Traxo password by following this link and entering the same email address that they used to log into GoMiles in the past. All data should be updated within 24 hours after their first login to Traxo.

To the thousands of GoMiles members, who have reaped the benefits of taking control over their frequent flyer miles, WELCOME to the expanded Traxo family! You can count on us to listen to your needs and providing you with awesome trip organization features that will help simplify your life and plan better trips.

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The Top of the Leaderboard: A Portrait of Traxo’s Top Traveler

Traxo leaderboards Travel Score

Part of our job building one of the largest social, networked platforms for travel is that as developers, we are continuously evaluating and re-evaluating the user experience. And part of this process involves constant reinventing of the tools we use in a way that best facilitates a certain “richness of interaction” within the community.

Introductions of features such as Loyalty tracker, Traxo travel score, and worldwide Travel Leaderboards have been some of the natural results of this process.

Perched atop the rankings on this tenth of October is Leith Stevens, a twenty-something Boulder-based travel entrepreneur. Mr. Stevens maintains a busy schedule flying around the world meeting clients and business partners as CEO of Flextrip, and by the time we had a chance to catch up with the smooth-talking Aussie, he was already making final preparations to fly to Singapore for an industry conference.

Leith has logged over two hundred seven trips and over six hundred thousand miles over the past three years alone. A quick glance at his travel record reveals that he typically spends over half of his time travelling and on the road. You might consider him a true road warrior.

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Traxo adds Travel Leaderboards, see the top ranked travelers in the world

Traxo leaderboards Travel Score

Since the introduction of the travel score, we’ve been enthusiastically gauging the reactions of our members. One comment that we’ve received from our users is that while it was easy to see the scores of your existing buddies on Traxo, there didn’t exist one place to go where you could see the top travelers across the entire network.

We’ve addressed these comments and now allow you to see the top scoring travelers in the world through our new Traxo Leaderboard feature. There are four new travel leaderboards we are announcing today: highest travel score, total countries visited, total states visited, and total number of travel loyalty accounts linked.

The debut of the Traxo leaderboard is truly a milestone, because for the first time ever, you can see how you stack up against virtually, the most-seasoned travelers in the world. Our data-harvesting technology allows us to verify each metric according to actual, confirmed travel reservations rather than self-reported claims. Our top travelers are the real deal, and are backed by real travel credentials.

So what exactly is a top traveler? Well, we see from the top of the Leaderboards that our top nine travelers have already each made validated visits to 20 different countries, seven of our travelers have traveled to more than half the U.S. states, and 34 of our travelers have linked more than 20 of their travel accounts. In fact the most experienced travelers on Traxo have already taken verified trips to 30 different countries, have visited 34 different states, and have linked 34 different travel loyalty accounts. We encourage you to peruse the Leaderboard and see if you or any of your buddies rank among the top ranked travelers.

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Automatically import booked trip itineraries to Outlook, iCal, iPhone, Google Calendars

Traxo travel Calendar feed for iPhone Outlook iCal Google

We’ve all asked the same question. Everyone knows you need to stay organized in today’s busy, busy world. How to do it? That’s the million dollar question.

On top of meetings, appointments, chores, and everything else organized in your calendar, keeping track of your trips can be a time-consuming, if unpleasant task.

After a while, things turn into a unappealing mess of itineraries, trip confirmations, confirmation numbers, rescheduled dates, and email after email after email. And it’s your job to separate the few useful emails from the ones touting your favorite carrier’s new fall getaways to the Caribbean.

And in the end, you’re still always doing the same search of your email inbox twelve hours before your flight to confirm flight times and grab that flight confirmation number that you failed to jot down the first time.

So take a deep breath. Relax. We have a solution for you. And if you already have a Traxo account, it will take less than a minute of your time.

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Create an automatic log of your travels on Traxo using foursquare and Gowalla

gowalla foursquare traxo tripit

We’ve all been in this situation before. Regular office-cooler chit chat with a friend turns to the popular subject of travels and the conversation typically goes something like this:

“Oh wow, when are you going to Barcelona?”
“Next week with my husband. We’re both so excited, it’s our two year wedding anniversary.”
“That’s so awesome. You know, I was just there last year with Alice. There’s a really beautiful place right on the beach that has the best paella I’ve ever tasted.”
“The best?”
“The best.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“Remember the name of the place?”
“I forget, but I do remember there’s a cool leaning, tower type of sculpture on the beach nearby. Hold on, let me find it for you real quick on my phone”

**Fumbles with phone for a good minute.**

“…”
“Tell you what, just text me the place when you find it”

——-
Of course, we all have that one friend, with the near photographic memory of every place she’s ever been and the names of the people who were with her at every one of those places over the last ten years. But for most of us, whose minds are filled with other things, like school stuff, work stuff, or inane sports or pop culture trivia, keeping a mental note of all the places we’ve been is a taxing enough job for our brains to handle.

That’s why Traxo, by integrating with foursquare and Gowalla, has now made it easy to keep track of the places you’ve been, organized automatically trip by trip, date by date. You can throw that old tattered moleskin with jotted travel notes out the window (or in my case, crumpled receipts and cocktail napkins). More after the break.

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Increase Traxo Travel Score by linking Gowalla, foursquare, TripIt

past trip traxo foursqure gowalla tripit

A lot of our users have been clamoring for new and faster ways to increase their travel score as quickly as possible. We’re really excited to announce that you can now get credit for your past trips by linking your Gowalla, foursquare, and TripIt accounts to your Traxo account. We’re big fans of all three services and have dedicated users of all three right here at Traxo.

What this means is that perhaps you took a trip to San Diego and San Francisco last year, with your itinerary stored on the immensely useful travel organizer TripIt. Along the way, you checked-in at a few different stops on your smartphone using foursquare or Gowalla. After linking to Tripit, foursquare, or Gowalla in the connect new site page in the Travel Sites dropdown, Traxo will now pull data from your linked accounts and add these past trips to your history. This will then give you a boost in score that more accurately represents your own travel experience.

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So about this monster heat wave terrorizing the East Coast. Four places to beat the heat.

heat wave Traxo

Yes it’s hot out. In fact it’s been sweltering hot in Dallas since Memorial Day. Yet ever since the slowly moving right arm of the current heat monster enveloping practically all of the U.S. south has now slinked its way up the eastern seaboard, dropping our nation’s capital into yet another type of gridlock we call “CLIMATE SHOCK!”, we have been watching the reaction of the myriad news outlets reporting on the sudden weather change with a certain bit of bemusement.

And of course, obviously, the media has been predictably—and laughably—blustery with their pronouncements of late. Pressure cooker! Extreme heat! Heatmageddon! In 54 point red caps and bookended by rotating sirens!

So, back to Dallas, a quick perusal of the recent online status updates of friends in the area indicates business as usual—your normal number of “looking forward to the weekend, doing so-and-so can’t get any better than this”-type posts. However, checking up on my suddenly unlucky friends in the northeast and it appears that all hell has broken loose. “Booking flight to chilie [sic] ASAP!!!!!can’t take this heat anymore!

And while most of us, are unwilling to go to extremes like my friend Mr. Chilie [sic], there are still a few places outside of the super-searing, life-threatening, amoeba of humidity and death, that we can safely seek refuge at, in these doggiest of all dog days. In fact, just to make it easier, I’ve made a handy list right after the jump, of North American destinations that are currently sitting at below their historic July average temperatures. And just to be fair to everyone, I’ve chosen cities that are easily accessible by those sitting in “extreme heat!” in the Midwest, South, as well as Northeast.

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AF on the Radio, Rudy Maxa interviews founder Andres Fabris

Andres Fabris TraxoRudy Maxa World Traxo

Rudy Maxa is a journalist, blogger, and radio host who has a great syndicated show mostly about travel, travel deals, and basically how to get the most out of a limited travel budget. But Rudy Maxa also often has truly informative segments highlighting the beautiful national parks of our jolly good neighbors up north, and highlighting a proposed homeland security initiative outting known child burglars at the checkpoint.

And then sometimes, tucked away, sandwiched in between these two educational segments is an interview with our very own Andres Fabris, CEO. Here he talks a little bit about how Traxo generally works, the technology involved in pulling and aggregating data (“trips are automatically detected and saved”), and what the new Travel Score means for users.

The interview in its entirety can be found here, and the full transcript for the interview can be found after the jump.

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