[1][8] The origin of Virtualtourist is found in a project at the University of Buffalo to provide a Web-based map of all servers on the Internet.

[9] Shortly thereafter, two German computer science students, Tilman Reissfelder and Thorsten Kalkbrenner at the University of Karlsruhe, registered the URL.

By 1999, Reissfelder and Kalkbrenner had a site with a few hundred city locations with travel links that people could add to and which would reference their user profiles.

The site, which had links about “Hotels, Restaurants, Things to Do”, received 1.5 million page views per month from about 500,000 unique visitors.

[12][13] In September 2012, the company announced a partnership whereby it would provide perks to travelers with Contiki Tours who posted about their experiences on the website.