Foursquare Adds Travel Recommendations Feature

Your small business has a new reason to be listed — or a reason for updating your listing — on Foursquare.

The social geo-location site has introduced a new feature called Foursquare Trip Tips. It’s a Foursquare and Foursquare user-curated guide for upcoming trips you log into the site.

Users need to simply provide their travel destination, dates, and any applicable notes to receive a link that can be shared with friends on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network. Friends and family members can then visit the link and recommend places to visit, along with customized tips and suggestions. All the suggestions are collected into a list with a map, which is saved to the user’s phone for on-the-go access.

Foursquare Trip Tips is part of the Foursquare List feature, which allows users to crowdsource items on the list, but is more user-friendly than the List interface. And while the idea is quite simple, Trip Tips is a solution for travelers who want to properly plan their trips.

Foursquare Trip Tips also has another opportunity for your small business to get noticed through the app.

For businesses, the real appeal of this new feature lies in its location data. Foursquare users are more likely to visit a restaurant or cafe when they have their friends and family members strongly recommending it. Therefore, for businesses in the travel and hospitality industry, Foursquare can potentially become an important platform for attracting (or even losing) new customers.

A closer look at the location data and recommendations can further provide insights about how the target audience perceives the business. For example, what kind of food gets recommended the most from the restaurant? Or, what kind of feedback do competitors receive?

This is not the first time Foursquare has introduced a new feature to leverage the potential of location data to appeal to both consumers and businesses. The company has been building its flagship technology called Pilgrim since the early days of the iPhone.

With the Pilgrim technology, Foursquare collects aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data from its users, which is then offered as business analytics. To give an example, advertisers can pay Foursquare to find out if their campaigns actually drove people to try out a new variety of pizza or sign up for a special Zumba class.

Have you tried Foursquare Trip Tips yet?

Image: Foursquare 2 Comments ▼

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