Vacations Blog

With the proliferation of the internet, just about anyone and everyone with a keyboard can write something and be touted as an “expert” on topics ranging from politics to molecular fusion. It may be accurate to say – the keyboard is mightier than the sword.  In the travel industry, there are countless numbers of travel guides and reviews available on the web written by just about anyone who has traveled outside of their home zip code.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer reading printed travel guides than reading it on a computer screen just as I still prefer taking a bite into Dave Thomas’ Classic Hamburger with its square beef patties over the ones served in other fast food restaurants. Yes, times have changed especially when we’re talking about how technology has improved our lives, but there’s just something about the virtue of a book, where you can scribble in your notes, highlight passages, or even bend a few pages to mark your spots.  But times have changed, and many companies have found it necessary to change to an online marketing model in order to keep pace.

One company has managed to do both:  Fodor’s.  Just as how Coca-Cola has become an international icon that resonates something original or classic, Fodor’s has been a trusted name to travelers for generations. Since 1936, Fodor’s yellow and orange colored travel guides have remained a reliable source of information for travelers to get the scoop about their destination of choice.   And in recent years, Fodor’s has rolled out its online presence and beyond, including a mobile application.

Since my college years, I have collected literally boxes of Fodor’s travel guides that I used throughout my travels, including the ones given to me by friends who returned from their trips. The travel guides themselves tell their own stories of the journey as it served me and my friends well as an improvised pillow, photo and business card holder of the many interesting people we met and the hotels where we stayed, but ultimately it served us greatest as the trusted source of everything I ever needed to know for my trip to Bali.  But there are other travelers who have never purchased a single travel guide, and prefer to do their research online.  And there are still others, like many folks in our office, who started their traveling careers using printed guidebooks, but because of the ascendancy of the Internet (and getting hired by UpTake!) have transitioned to exclusively online research.

With sites like Fodor’s, one can have the best of both worlds – printed and online. Regardless of how you research your next trip, sometimes nothing beats revisiting a classic.

Elisabeth Osmeloski (now at the vacation rentals site Zonder) just posted on Search Engine Watch about Travel Search 2.0 and I thought I’d add my own two cents (albeit more travel search centric view) to this topic.

Elizabeth:

As the OTA’s and the meta travel/comparison engines have become so firmly entrenched, the only thing to do is build upon the experience and create added value around the basic layer of content you have. It’s no longer enough to just push rates and dates — publishers must blend together a variety of information, including maps, user reviews, editorial reviews, images, a community platform, sharing widgets and bookmarking tools for trip planning assistance, and direction on the booking process to top it all off.

We couldn’t agree more. TravelMuse recently launched and I also had the opportunity to talk briefly with Kevin Fliess, founder and CEO of TravelMuse. As I blogged in my earlier post about travel planning, I’m excited about the rise of new travel planning startups like TravelMuse. My perspective is that travel planning is a complicated workflow (that often involves multiple people) and a variety of tools will emerge to serve this need. We do have the dream of integrating with a number of tools and community sites, but right now are dealing with post-launch startup issues like serving pages fast and keeping the servers up! So our brief chat with Kevin helped us think more broadly about how the travel landscape will look in the future.

So what is TravelMuse?

Destination Guides

Elizabeth does a good just summarizing the TravelMuse approach to Destination Guides. From Elizabeth:

The primary focus of the site is high quality content, with a blend of traditional travel journalism and articles that work especially well in the online and social media space (e.g., Top 10 lists). In almost “magazine” style, but unquestionably in a 2.0 format, publishing a new “issue” weekly with a healthy dose of high-quality photography, the content side of things is well covered, at least in the featured destinations done to date. On top of the editorial content, User-generated content (UGC) plays an enormous role.

TravelMuse won’t stop there. User-generated content and professional content working hand-in-hand is the approach that Kevin, Eric, and the team intends to take. For example, I posted a user review of the Le Meridien San Francisco page on TravelMuse just to try it out.

Inspiration Finder

TravelMuse has an interesting inspiration finder. The early stage of travel planning is indeed inspiration and discovery, and TravelMuse has developed an interesting “wizard” like approach that allows you to express what you want:

TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner has two components. One is a cool bookmarklet tool that allows you to clip any page on the Web and add it to your itinerary.

It then has a Trip Planner that organizes all the content into one area.

I was even able to add the San Diego things to do page from Kango.com on this planning tool!

TravelMuse

TravelMuse is trying to address the early inspiration, discovery and planning phase of travel planning. They are trying to stitch together all phases of this initial process together in an integrated whole. My experience as an end user is as follows:

1. Destination guides provided great professional editorial and great photos. It is truly an inspiring site with great visuals and great ideas for travel. The large number of themes supported also address the inspiration and dreaming phase of trip planning.
2. Trip Planner. There is definitely use for a trip planner, and I really like the idea of a bookmarklet. TravelMuse has done it well and allows you to tag Web pages as a specific type of travel product so it is better organized in your trip planner. Disclosure: Uptake also has what we call a “trip folder” in the Alpha stage and we expect a bookmarklet to be included in that tool as well.
3. Trip Inspiration Tool. The wizard approach is a fun way to discover different destinations. However, there should be more ways to change the criteria you used on the suggestion page. For example, I initially chose “within 4 hours” of SFO and then later I wanted to go “within 2 hours” of SFO and had to redo the whole search. There should be some adjustment right there on the inspiration page.

TravelMuse is bringing much needed innovation to the travel space and we expect they will play a role in revolutionizing the way people use the Web to plan travel!