Social Travel Planning Site Gtrot Debuts City Discovery Service

Social travel sharing/planning website Gtrot.com (short for ‘globetrotting’) is debuting a personalized city discovery service that aggregates travel recommendations from friends’ social network updates into an interactive grid.

Founded by Brittany Laughlin and Zachary Smith, Gtrot helps users source travel plans, deals, tips, and recommendations from other friends via their social graph. For example, if you are visiting Paris and need travel advice, you can use Gtrot’s Facebook app or site to see which of your friends have been or live there, so you can reach out to them to get personalized advice and recommendations.

With today’s update, the site has been redesigned to focus on city discovery. Simply enter the destination city, and gtrot’s technology will parse data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other sites to determine where your friends have been, what activities they took part in, their current location and more.

Gtrot will also recommends a curated set of places, deals and events, based on the information culled from the user’s social networks. Recommendations are presented in a photo-grid that shows the friends who visited each venue, the source of deals, and events coinciding with the preferred travel dates. Users can save the items they want to include in their plans.

Gtrot recently raised funding from Lightbank.