About Tropki.com
About Tropki
Tropki is an independent travel search engine, dreamed up and built by a small team of experienced travellers. The project started in 2008 with a map of attractions in Russia. We travelled a lot around the country and kept finding interesting places that most tourists never hear about. There was almost no information about them, and we wanted to share what we'd found — to gather everything worth seeing on a single map, to keep as a memory and share with friends. The first entries were abandoned wooden churches and old noble estates of central Russia. As we researched them, we wrote articles about the country's most beautiful corners and marked them on the map. We also added natural landmarks — forest springs, waterfalls, hidden little trails deep in the wilderness. That's how the name was born: Tropki — "little paths." Journeys on a map.
In 2009 we began travelling the world in earnest, visiting Greece, Italy, Spain and France for the first time, and that's when the international version appeared. Alongside the attractions, we started adding places to stay. Booking sites barely existed back then, so collecting hotel data and reviews on a map was genuinely useful for active travellers like us. We invited experts on Southeast Asia and opened a forum where travellers could share first-hand experience and ask them questions. Among places to stay we first added holiday bases and campsites, then hotels, hostels and every other kind of accommodation. From a guide to Russia's wooden churches, the site grew into a large guide to hotels, tours and excursions across the world.
Over years of work and travel we've become genuinely experienced at finding and booking holiday accommodation. We've helped travellers who wrote to us find affordable, comfortable options for their trips, and helped hoteliers list their properties in our catalogue for free when they weren't on the booking sites. Tropki remains an independent project to this day — a free catalogue of places to stay across Russia, the CIS, Europe, Asia, the Americas, the whole world.
The technical side is handled by a software engineer with a specialist background — a graduate of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics (VMK) at Moscow State University (MSU), with 30 years of experience working with databases and 20 years devoted to web development: before Tropki, together with a professional designer, they built more than 50 websites for companies.
What makes Tropki different
We've gathered everything we could find online about a single place and put it all on one page. For a hotel that means photos and videos, guest reviews from several independent sources, 360° street panoramas, room tours, live webcams, current weather and the nearest beaches. Our algorithm works out the route to the beach or to the nearest metro station, and shows you the cafés and attractions nearby. Today our main advantage is being able to compare room prices across several booking services at once, so you can pick the best-value, most convenient option without wasting time scanning every booking system on the internet.
Where our information comes from
We're an aggregator, so we think it's important to be open about our sources:
- Hotels, rooms and prices: Booking.com, ZenHotels, Trip.com and Agoda
- Reviews: ZenHotels, Google, and reviews left by visitors to our site and the booking services
- Street panoramas and 360° views: Google and Yandex
- Beaches and restaurants: Google and OpenStreetMap
- Weather: OpenWeatherMap and World Weather Online
- Webcams: various public sources, added by hand
- Attractions: our own collected material, Google and OpenStreetMap
Wherever possible the data is refreshed daily through partner APIs, and we additionally check and correct it — both with our algorithms and by hand.
How we use AI
We use AI to help prepare some descriptions, review summaries and FAQs, and for analysis. Nothing is published unchecked: AI-assisted text is verified against the source data and corrected — algorithmically and by hand. Factual and legal information is prepared manually, not generated.
How the project is funded
Tropki being free to use is our core rule — we never charge you a commission. As an independent catalogue of hotels, tours and places to stay, Tropki may receive a small commission from the booking services if you follow a link and book your trip on their site. The price doesn't change for you, and it lets the project keep running, growing and adding new travel material. Just as important is what we don't do: we don't take money from hotels for a higher place in our results, and we don't disguise ads as search results — in fact there are no ads on our site at all. An honest search shows you every option, with no hidden marketing.
Our mission
Our mission is simple: to help you travel more often, and more easily. We do everything we can to make planning a trip convenient and efficient — so you can discover new paths of your own.
Who runs the project and how to reach us
Tropki is run by a small, independent team — not a big corporation, and that's our strength: behind every page are real people who love to travel themselves and work every day to improve the search. The site is operated by an independent professional registered as self-employed (autónomo) in Spain. Write to us any time at info@tropki.com — we read every message and reply quickly. You can also use the Feedback section on the site.
Our partners
Booking.com · ZenHotels · Agoda · Trip.com · Kiwitaxi · Tiqets
Tropki has been online since 2008; the international version launched in 2009.