Tripster Launches Midwest Destination, Chicago

– Travel and Tourism Supplier Engagements Triple in the First Month
– Chicago’s 50+ Million Visitors a Year is a Top Three Traveled City in the US

St. Louis, Missouri – May 12, 2016 – Tripster, providing travelers tickets to theme parks, shows and attractions as well as hotels and lodging in specific travel destinations, today announced the launch of Chicago for the 50 million-plus visitors Chicago hosts every year. Chicago is Tripster’s second travel destination launched in the first four months of 2016, and the third ‘National Market’ destination opened by the Company over the last two years.

On February 14, 2016 Tripster enabled Chicago to promote and facilitate travel and tourism to Chicago. Over the course of two months, Tripster has been collaborating with  travel and tourism suppliers to develop extensive content on popular Chicago attractions including Skydeck Chicago, 360 Chicago, sightseeing tours, museums, Broadway shows, and hotels available throughout the ‘Windy City’. Different than other destination-travel websites, the tourism activities and attractions featured on the site can be reviewed, ticketed and booked directly on the Tripster website. Tripster’s roster of participating travel and tourism suppliers have increased three-fold since the end of April and each is actively providing information and content to Tripster to attract visitors and vacationers.

On May 1, 2016 the site was formally launched and promoted. Since its launch, www.tripster.com has successfully converted 5.0% of visitors to the site to Tripster customers who have booked their Chicago itineraries through Tripster. Tripster’s 5.0% conversation rate is more than twice the national average for on line travel sites in the U.S.  (Source: Adobe Analytics).

Chicago completes the Company footprint and nationwide exposure in the three largest cities in the U.S along with New York (2014) and Los Angeles (2015). This exposure equally benefits the hundreds of travel service providers and hotel operators who gain access to Tripster’s 2.5 million destination-traveling customers. Illinois-based Hostmark Hospitality Group, which operates upscale, full-service, boutique, luxury and service hotels is one of Tripster’s customers and a hotel operator featured in Chicago.

“Tripster gives our Chicago hotels a completely new marketing approach by selling Chicago as a destination and complements our promotion of our rooms within packages,” said Renee Wilhite, Senior Regional Director of Sales & Marketing with Hostmark Hospitality. “Tripster’s website is intuitive and constantly enhancing our customers’ travel planning experience which produces a steady flow potential guests. We anticipate attracting more destination travelers to our Chicago properties as a result and look forward to expanding our relationship with Tripster.”

Chicago joins Tripster’s current portfolio of 13 destination-travel cities. Tripster destinations are featured on content-rich websites and enabled by its proprietary reservation and ticketing engines. This combination provides travelers a self-serve environment to research and create their travel experience. Different than content-only travel portals that simply link visitors to local travel and tourism sites, Tripster consolidates bookings and information onto one, easy-to-navigate site that also features traveler testimonials, proprietary review and editorials, local insight, and multimedia.

“Travelers don’t just get an easy-to-use website—they get the first-hand knowledge and insight we share from traveling to these destinations ourselves,” said John Johnson, President of Tripster. “Sharing our experience and local expertise is an important value for travelers who rely on this show-and-tell content.  Destinations also benefit from this additional source of information and the widespread distribution of content on their destination. In terms of actual data, travelers stay longer, do more and spend more at destinations.”

Tripster has targeted several new destinations in the Company’s designated National, Regional and Seasonal markets in 2016. The Company’s platform connects its customers to more than 1,500 travel providers throughout its 13 current 13 destinations. Tripster customers seamlessly purchase a variety of travel supplier products and book their hotels with a secured credit card transaction under a single-user profile.

About Tripster

Since 2001, Tripster has provided more than 2.5 million travelers with destination-specific travel planning and reservation services for ticketed events, world-renowned theme parks, adventure activities, tours, theatrical and music shows, plus hotels and lodging.  Using a proprietary booking engine, Tripster customers can access first-hand content and reviews to plan and book entire vacations within a single transaction.  In addition, the Company also provides destination marketing organizations and travel suppliers reservation and packaging fulfillment services through white label versions of their proprietary system.  Tripster is based in St. Louis MO and currently operates dedicated destination websites in Branson, MO; Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, TN; Myrtle Beach, SC; Williamsburg, VA; New York, NY; San Diego and Los Angeles, CA; Chicago, IL; the Hawaiian Islands; Destin, Panama City Beach, St. Augustine and Orlando, FL.