Ruba launches user generated travel guide website

Ruba, Inc. today announced the beta launch of its user generated travel guide website www.ruba.com. Ruba lets users discover their next trip by browsing highly visual guides written by other travelers about interesting themes such as "The Top 7 Most Picturesque Towns in Provence France."

Ruba embraces the highly social nature of travel planning via tight integration with Facebook and Twitter and integrates Google maps for geographic locations and addresses. The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber and is backed by leading venture capital firms Benchmark and DFJ. Advisory Board members with backgrounds as senior executives from Google, Yelp, Yahoo, and other leading companies are helping guide Ruba’s introduction and growth.

Ruba makes it fun and easy to browse and discover amazing new places around the world that best match a user’s travel tastes. Unlike other travel review sites where users consume reviews of individual hotels, restaurants, or sights, on Ruba users explore full guides which are collections of reviews of the best places (e.g., My Favorite Historical Places in Italy).

Ruba’s highly engaging visual interface with thousands of high quality pictures empowers users to enjoy travel exploration and research even if they have no immediate plans for a trip.

"I believe that it’s dramatically easier to gauge the travel personality of a reviewer when I can see a crisp collection of her favorite places," said CEO Mike Cassidy. "Once I’ve found an author I like, I’m really curious to see all the places around the world that she really likes."

In just a short private beta period, Ruba guides have been created for places in dozens of different countries, primarily in Western Europe and Southeast Asia. Ruba’s early users have created a wealth of guides covering a wide variety of topics including:

Great Places Along the Amalfi Coast of Italy
Best Pubs To Spend a Rainy Afternoon in Ireland In
Best Barcelona Hotels at Any Price

Geographic coverage will expand (including to the US) as the userbase grows.

As travel planning is generally highly social, Ruba has leveraged the power of Facebook and Twitter in many ways:

Ruba users can easily ask their friends on Facebook to contribute to a Ruba Guide to help plan a trip. It’s now even easier to ask, "Anyone been to Thailand?" and collect great recommendations on things to see there.

Ruba users can instantly share any travel Guides they’ve created with their friends via Twitter or Facebook.

"Separating the wheat from the chaff of travel information on the web has become unbearably difficult," said Rich Barton, founder of Expedia and current CEO of Zillow. "Ruba brings a new team and a new approach to traveler-generated guides."