Loogares.com was founded by friends, Nicolás Brown (Commercial Engineer), Alberto Marcías (Designer) and Jordi Casanueva (Designer) while traveling in a modded out van (photo at left) in the north of Chile. The details of that evening are a little fuzzy, so I am not sure if they were riding in the Scooby Mobile (Mystery Machine), but insiders tell me they were definitely on a wild and crazy adventure. Traveling on a bootstrapper’s time and budget, they wanted to make the most of their travel experience. Thus, after intensely discussing is their an app for that….startup mode set in.
Founded in Santiago, Chile, Loogares.com is South America’s leading online entertainment guide. While the startup is not intended to be an arbitrage of its U.S. semi equivalent, Yelp – truth be told, for yelpers in South America, it provides an active community of ‘Loogareños’ who share unbiased reviews on various destinations (mostly entertainment and tourism based) in their respective community.
To date the Loogares.com community, which is primarily based in Santiago, Chile has grown to 3,000+ strong and they have contributed nearly 9,000 reviews on approximately 7,000 places. With a focus on the entertainment and hospitality sector, most of the reviews consist of bars, restaurants and places to hang out. Nicolás says that the team at Loogares.com is always looking to enhance the user experience and motivate reviewers to share their personal and valuable experience. At present, the average reviewer time is just over 3.5 minutes.
As the team looks forward to the year ahead, Loogares.com is putting the final touches on its English language website, with hopes of getting user reviews from ‘gringos’ traveling in South America. And they are also counting down to their international expansion, with Argentina (Buenos Aires) slated to be the first country they launch in February 2012 (estimated).
Connect with Loogares.com:
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