WAYN (Where Are You Now), the travel social network has signed a multi-million dollar strategic partnership with the India Today Group. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, though. Under the deal, WAYN will offer a co-branded portal with Travel Plus, the travel brand of India Today Group (essentially a travel magazine). At the time of writing this post, WAYN.com already redirects to travelplus.wayn.com.
According to the company, the new travel portal will showcase exclusive and premium stories, pictures and videos of Travel Plus (we’re assuming they’re talking about the magazine) and allow users to share them on their WAYN network. The portal will also provide all WAYN Indian users with more specific travel content and deals in the market. The network will also offer advertising solutions to India Today’s advertisers, which means they’ll be able to offer deals targeting WAYN’s users in India. So it’s a content plus ad sales tie-up, it seems.
Note that this is not WAYN’s first tie-up in India, and it had appointed Percept Knorigin as its official creative agency in 2007, to build presence for the network in India.
WAYN claims to have a user base of four million users in India and the site claims that it is growing by a few thousand users, daily. It claims that it has a global user base of over 21 million. We’re not sure how many of these users are active users, so this number should be taken with a pinch of salt. WAYN has also been in controversy involving spamming contacts of newly registered users. It has also admitted that fraudulent members had been sending SPAM messages.
WAYN has previously signed deals with Indonesian Tourism, Airbnb, London and Partners and South Africa Tourism, among others.
Other travel social networks
Online travel agent MakeMyTrip, had recently launched Tripalong, which is essentially a social application around travel, which allows users to plan share their travel details – flight details, airport halts and cities they’re travelling to – with friends (LinkedIn contacts and Facebook friends), thus allowing them to connect if they’re on the same flight or airport or travelling to the same city.
Yatra had also launched Raahi.com, a travel social network, which was similar to TripAdvisor.
