Photo: Breslavtsev Oleg/Shutterstock

A New Trivia App Helps You Fly to the Caribbean for Free

Technology + Gear
by Matthew Meltzer Mar 4, 2019

Though we sometimes mock the Cliff Clavins among us, knowing loads of seemingly-useless information can seriously pay off. There’s free drinks on cruise ships, first of all. And who can forget the HQ Trivia craze of 2017-2018, when we all went nuts over the possibility of winning $5.42 by miraculously knowing the capital of Moldova when two million other people didn’t.

But now you can win a lot more than a jackpot split 1,300 ways, netting yourself a nice island tan for your expert knowledge on the Caribbean. A new app called Trippzy, created by veteran travel journalists with help from app developers, helps you win points toward everything from flights to scuba lessons just by answering some not-so-obvious questions about the islands.

Here’s how it works: Every day you’re given a certain number of “tokens,” each one allowing you to answer one trivia question about the Caribbean. They’ll range from the actually guessable — like “What is the national currency of Curacao?” — to the impossible but clearly sponsored, such as “How many rooms are in the Kura Hulanda resort?”

Some are interesting, like learning where the name “tortola” comes from. Others are useful, like finding out there are actually two airports in St. Kitts and Nevis.

You’ll have 15 seconds to answer, and the faster you guess the correct answer, the more “tripcoins” you receive. Each question is multiple choice, so you’ve got a pretty decent shot at getting them right. And even if you don’t, in true millennial fashion, you’ll still get points just for playing.

Each question is worth a maximum of 500 tripcoins, and you’ll get 10 questions per day until you run out of tokens. Once you run out, you’ll have to wait until the next day to play again.

The whole thing has a delightful steel-drum soundtrack playing in the background to get you in the island spirit and your coworkers sufficiently irritated.

After your high of correctly guessing the national dish of Curacao, it’s time to cash in your points. Rewards are available in six destinations: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, Curacao, and Nevis. Right now, most offer $25 flight certificates redeemable for 15,000 points. The exception is Curacao, which has all kinds of deals from free paddleboard rentals to scuba diving to a $5,000 vacation package which includes roundtrip airfare for two, a luxury hotel stay, $500 in cash, and “VIP experiences.”

Just like Skee-Ball tickets, it takes a while to accumulate enough to get anything worthwhile. But if you can rack up a few thousand points every day, and play every day on your way to work, in a few months you might have enough to fly somewhere warm. All for learning interesting stuff about a region most people lump into one, big, tropical vacationland.

The app has plans to expand to other destinations, but the Caribbean seems like a pretty good start this time of year. And as we can feed our national obsession with a chance to escape the cold for free, Trippzy seems like the perfect candidate for the next great American time-killer.

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