About Us

Tripmondo is an experimental sparetime project and a hommage to free, open and global online web services and data sources.

I try to provide a great user experience - with the help of great friends supporting me with their knowledge and thoughts or hands-on. Still, collecting information on a global scale turned out to be way harder than I thought.

Initially, the aggregated information was far from really relevant to a given location and took ages to finally deliver meaningful pages. With the current engine version 3 results got much better for many locations. Sometimes we are surprised by how awesome the results are - usually better results are returned for more popular places.

The platform you are currently looking at, is the result of many test and fails. None-the-less, there are still quite a few places, which we are not exactly proud of (say crappy results). We are constantly working on improving the technology and ultimately your experience. So if you stumble over "not so good" content, please let us know and point us at these flaws.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tripmondo?

Tripmondo is a site half mash-up and half editorial content. The Magazine features information about airports, currencies as well as articles about various travel topics. The TripExplorer is the dynamic core of Tripmondo. It tries to aggregate relevant information for places in the world to answer the question: "What's it like in ... ?".

How many places do you know?

Hard to answer. Theoretically, we are should be able to show content for roughly 2.5 million places. However, not all places may provide as much data as e.g. Hamburg, Germany. If we believe that a place doesn't provide enough valuable content, you won't find any pages for it and we won't update that location on a regular basis.

How do you collect what content?

Simplifyed, we ask e.g. Panoramio: "Hey, Panoramio! What are your most favourite pictures from around New York City we can show?". The Panoramio webservice will (most likely) then give us back a list of items we can show. We will remember the answer for a while and then ask again after some time to see, whether there are any new cool pictures to show.

How reliable is the data

Well, to be honest, I can not say exactly how precise and reliable the data is you see. The Trip-Explorer is a section that is partly based on API content. I tested quite a few places but it is impossible to test them all. For more common places, the site experience wil generally be better since there is more data available. Let's put it this way: you shouldn't base decisions that have a potential to harm you on the information displayed. Use common sense.

I want some content to be removed or changed/corrected!

Now this is a tricky question. I fully respect your copyright. But the site receives most of the content automatically from the APIs of the mentioned services. Their terms of service allow us to use this data and provide us with this data. The content will usually automatically be removed from our pages (this applies for eg. tweets, videos, pictures, webcams and most other services) when you remove it from your account or set the item on private on the corresponding platform. If you still believe, we did something wrong, please contact us and name the URL where you identified the problem. It greatly helps if you can provide a brief description of the content so we can spot it right away.

If you want something changed, please change your data on the platform in question. We regularly update our locations (some more frequently than others). Your changes should appear on this website shortly after.

Please note: We don't actually host any of e.g. the images or videos you see. This is delivered by the indicated service. However, we are able to block specific items of content. If there's something that requires imediate attention: Please notify us, and we'll do our very best to ensure that the item will no longer be displayed.

Are you a company?

No, first of all Tripmondo is a non-profit experiment. Yes we do show some advertising but this is to cover some costs for hosting and maintenance. Our intention is not to pollute search-indices with low value articles or scraped content. As such, we try to be defensive about what places we promote to search engines and stick to free and publicly available data. As said, Tripmondo is still in a very experimental state. If you believe we show crap or wrong stuff, please help us and notify us of these spots. If you believe we have not correctly stated the original author, please let us know.

Special Thanks

A special thank you goes to everyone having supported me on the way of getting this beast done! This goes to the developers and community of CMSMS, the companies offering the webservices we use, the projects providing structured data such as geonames.org. The friends and family encuraging me not to quit on this one :D