Choosing where to go on holidays can sometimes be an overwhelming task, especially when one has decided to go abroad. The information and content online is so plentiful that you often feel overwhelmed. Website Tripinview.com is an online startup project that aims to present the coastlines in the Mediterranean in a unique, innovative and ‘objective’ way, as the owners claim.

Perusing the site one immediately is struck by the stunning aerial videography and photography that offers the users the chance to be the ‘co-pilot’ in helicopter flying over the Greek and other Mediterranean coastlines. The minds behind the concept are two Greeks, Vangelis Kasimatis, a longtime software developer, and Achilles Chatzinikos, a professional photographer and videographer.

The initial idea came about when Vangelis was searching for visual content of seaside travel destinations in Greece to send to a German friend. Achilles, the co-founder, explains that while searching online he realised there was no professional photo or video content of even the most popular tourist destinations in Greece, which gave birth to the idea to capture on camera (photos and videos) all the Greek coastline. The project started with Greece but quickly moved to the next stage, capturing the coastline of all the Mediterranean and the world.

‘Tripinview is an innovative website that offers a new way to search summer travel destinations, as it presents the whole Mediterranean coastline with aerial video and photographs from a helicopter’, says Achilles. The imagery is accompanied by useful information like hotels, fishing spots, entertainment etc. The website currently has over 300 hours of aerial video footage and 800,000 photos for 550 seaside destinations and 8,500 points of interest like marinas, beaches, ports, bays, villages and urban reins. So far it has covered a total of 40,000 km of coastlines in Greece, Spain, Portugal, France and Turkey.

The platform has only been running for 2 months and the first signs are encouraging, Achilles says. Geotag Aeroview (that develops Tripinview) has invested 3mln Euros in the startup, while Tripinview employs 18 professionals, ranging cinematographers, photographers, web developers, software developers, programmers and designers. Achilles explains that the next step in the company’s strategy is to keep enriching its content by covering more countries and new points of interest like rivers, lakes, cities etc.