🌱 TripDoodler empowers conscious travelers to find & share verified sustainable places to sleep & eat, powered by a crowd-sourced traveler ratings.
We are a global team of passionate conscious travelers dedicated to empowering all travelers around the world to create adventures based on more sustainable travel choices, without having to compromise what matters most to us when we travel.
With Tripdoodler you can acknowledge & share sustainability actions you see at the places you visit - easy, independent, and trustworthy. When you help build up the database of Tripdoodler, you map more sustainability information for the next traveler.
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Comments
We are currently making a lot of improvements to our platform. Therefore, we would love to get feedback from avid travelers who have an interest in sustainability. If you are interested, please check how at www.tripdoodler.com/community.
Such a great opportunity for avid travelers like us (with an embedded passion for responsible travel and sustainable tourism) to help build a platform the aids in making better travel choices. Superb! <3
Great to have a resource like this. Travelers need more tools to make good choices in terms of making travel more sustainable.
Hi Magnus, thanks for sharing TripDoodler with the Travel Massive community and this is a great idea with a lot of potential!
Where is most of your content located? I see Copenhagen has the most pins... are there other cities / destinations with good coverage? What are the most common ratings? Any surprising insights from the data you've collected?
On the UX front. I tried to find a way to search for ratings on the app (on desktop browser) but it's a little tricky to navigate. What is on your roadmap for the app?
Hi Ian, thanks a lot for the feedback.
Yes, as we are Copenhagen-based most pins are in Copenhagen at this point in time. Our ambitions are however world-wide, and you can basically rate anyt place restaurant, accommodation or shop that you can find on Google Maps.
Most people are rating "food & drinks" places, probably for the simple reason that you visit more of these places than accommodations.
We have a lot of interesting things on the roadmap with a lot of releases in the coming, including improvements of the search functionalities of the map and UX/UI more broadly.
Are you able to elaborate the feedback a bit? Is it when you are search for a place that you can rate, that you can't find it?
Quick feedback on the map:
1. Since I'm based in Australia (and there's no pins here) I had to zoom out (a lot!) to find the content. My suggestion would be to put a few links to "popular places" in the menu so users can easily get a feel for the content (even if it's not where they live).
2. I was also interested to filter content by rating... for example to see what places have 'Reducing Food Waste'. I couldn't find a way to do this?
3. I'd suggest to rename "Get Started" on the home page to something like "Try The App" or "View Map". The term "Get Started" sounds more like an onboarding term, so I was hesitant to click it at first!
Hope this feedback is helpful.
Hi Ian, Thanks a lot for this very qualified and valuable feedback.
1. We have had the UX problem that users think that they can only access places with a pin. The reality is that all places in categories of "food & drinks", "accommodations" and "shops" that are on Google Maps are actually searchable and can be rated on TripDoodler. But they way the map is working that hasn't been clear to all users. We have an update this week or the next, that should hopefully fix this.
The "popular places" or something similar is a good idea. We should consider something along those lines.
2. Yes, that is definitely also on the roadmap for development. At this point we are focusing more on building the database, so we have more data to build such filtering on. But yes, this will be a feature.
3. Yes, that is also a good point, we should work with wording here.
We very much appreciate this, Ian.
I get the concept, but I think the issue remains (as is almost always the case) determining what sustainability is—your labelling is way to non-specific to be actionable and sustainability isn’t a bunch of standalone islands—it is an archipelago.
Re the vague labelling, to illustrate my point, I looked at two properties:
Hotel SP34 by Brøchner Hotels and a&o Copenhagen Sydhavn, both of which have the “Lower energy consumption” tag.
In the former case, what this tag equates to is “We’re trying to reduce our power consumption and hope to have knocked off 5-7% by 2025.” Slow clap fellas. (www.brochner-hotels.com/csr/) The latter, claims to use 75% less energy than other hotels, and while that could mean a bazillion different things, at a glance it seems a far “more sustainable” option, at least re energy, than the other joint. (www.aohostels.com/en/green/) Sidenote, is the latter site a shameless Booking.com ripoff, or is it a Booking company?
Should these be considered as equals? I would think no.
Re my island metaphor, it appears that to get onto the map a property needs to be somehow sustainable, but not across multiple touchpoints. Plenty of the places I looked at had no note re energy use—what does that mean? Do they have a coal-fired generator in the backyard? But if they’re allowed on for other things like “no meat,” or “ethical whatever,” without satisfying other criteria, then it devalues the whole product—this is how you end up with tourists feeling like they’re travelling sustainably because they are drinking their gin & tonic through a bamboo straw by their private horizon pool. More greenwashing.
I think this is why you see cumulative scores used rather than individual flags, as it is near impossible for a hotel business to be truly sustainable. Delivering accurate scores would be a far more complex undertaking—and I’d be very cautious of trusting it to crowdsourcing—but is far more actionable.
Sorry for the long comment, but despite the above, I like the concept in principle, but to be something that was truly actionable, I think there are many ways it could be altered. Good luck with it
This is an excellent tool for me to recommend to clients.
Congrats to the Tripdoodler team for their recent merge with enablesus!
"We are excited to announce the merger of TripDoodler and enablesus, combining TripDoolder’s user-based sustainability rating with enablesus's corporate transparency score. With this merger, we're strengthening our work on the shared mission to make sustainability relevant, transparent, and easy for consumers and businesses to understand and take action."
Press Release: www.tripdoodler.com/press/tripdoodler-merges-with-enablesus
Thanks, Ian, we are quite excited about this and how we can now leverage all the great sustainability ratings from travelers in one transparency score with certification and business data - making even more sustainability information available where we make our travel choices.