trivago provides visitors with superior information and assist them in making informed travel decisions. The trivago community concept however extends far beyond the pure exchange of information. Members also develop, approve, and manage content. The more experienced a member is the more responsibilities he/she receives.

In return for their efforts, members not only benefit by meeting great people from all over the world, but they also make money. trivago distributes nearly half of the revenues it generates via bookings to community members on a bi-monthly basis.

Visitors to our site can look up information, as well as view travel blogs and holiday photos from other individuals. They can also write personalized reviews and upload their own photos. We achieve this through a unique and dedicated community that provides continuously updated high quality content. Our approach translates into a vast amount of high quality noncommercial travel information and the most detailed and largest European hotel database.

When the trivago idea was conceived in 2003, its three original team members envisioned creating a travel information portal with a search engine that was fundamentally different from general purpose engines like Google. The team aimed to tackle a specific vertical market that traditional engines could not serve well.

Travel and the hotel industry in particular quickly emerged as an ideal target market. Companies such as Expedia and Travelocity had proven that consumers would book their hotels online, however the information these companies provided was incomplete. Moreover, generic search engines such as Yahoo could not satisfy the consumer information need. Their “search and store” approach simply did not work for travel, an industry in which information on pricing and availability changes rapidly.

The team programmed relentlessly for months. By the summer of 2004 they had developed the beta version of trivago... Over the next six months the new platform was tested and further developed by an ever increasing number of trivago enthusiasts. In June 2005 trivago GmbH thus was not only existing in an official framework, but the community was also fully functional for the first time. More and more content was added to trivago in the following months, and so at the end of 2005 the first official version already counted more than 150,000 visitors per month.

This growth continued steadily in 2006. trivago achieved its goal of becoming a truly international community, gaining more and more members in the UK, as well as in Spain at year's end. Since the beginning of 2007 more than one million visitors per month Europe-wide have trusted the travel advice of the trivago community