Not this year.
"Even though our numbers should be declining in terms of content because of our yearly seasonality, it is actually growing," says company founder Luc Levesque.
By all online metrics, the company grew at a remarkable pace in 2009. Mr. Levesque says the average time users spend on TravelPod's website is up by one-quarter and, according to online audience tracking firm Quantcast, the number of overall visitors has more than doubled over the past 12 months.
In the last week alone, users added more than 52,000 travel experiences to the company's website. In January, the company was seeing about 34,000 posts weekly.
Mr. Levesque credits a complete overhaul of TravelPod's blogging interface for making 2009 "probably the best year in our company's history."
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The facelift was focused on making the site more usable by, for example, reducing the need to manually refresh pages and the addition of a navigable timeline to the top of each blog.
"We took 12 years' worth of feedback from our members and ... rebuilt (the site) from top to bottom."
The company's remarkable growth helped offset any softness in the online advertising market, where TravelPod continues to draw most of its revenues, he says.
As the company's web traffic climbs, so does its workforce. It added three new engineers this year and continues to look "for more rock stars" to join its team, says Mr. Levesque, adding, "We're in growth mode."
"It's been a very good year ... People are landing on the site and saying, 'Wow! I want one.'" - Luc Levesque, founder and GM
And, just as TravelPod's website has evolved, so has its founder's own travels. Whereas Mr. Levesque journeyed across Europe in the late '90s and went door-to-door in Greece, looking for Internet access, the entrepreneur recently returned from a trip to Disney World.
Having a young son, he concedes, has "changed my travel patterns a bit."
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Year founded: 1997
Local head count: 10
Venture capital to date: None
Product: Travel blogging social network
