Vacations Blog

We recently argued that online travel is not “done” and that there were plenty of needs not served by Expedia or Travelocity. New companies, like TravelMuse, NileGuide, TripIt, and Dopplr are aiming to address some of these needs.

Facilitating the travel planning workflow is a huge opportunity

One area that is ripe for innovation is the development of new travel planning tools. Travel planning is actually a complex workflow with many different steps: inspiration, discovery, decision on destination, air travel comparison shopping, decision on lodging, itinerary tracking, decision on activities, booking everything…you get the idea.

Two stealth (private beta) and two recently launched companies are likely to provide some cool planning tools to make the planning process easier. Part 1 will cover TravelMuse, NileGuide, and Yahoo! Trip Planner. Part 2 will cover Dopplr, TripIt and some other company TBD.

TravelMuse

Travel Muse (blog) is trying to make travel planning easier through:

• Creating high quality editorial content, like their Chicago travel guide, mostly around city guides(launched)
• Providing a personalized trip planner (private alpha)

We asked CEO Kevin Fliess to comment on the secret trip planner:

Our planner is currently open to only a couple of hundred users so we are not communicating specifically how it works or what it does. Suffice it to say that it is very open and enables people to quickly organize all of their trip research.

(Disclosure: we are in discussions about potential business partnership opportunities with TravelMuse)

TravelMuse’s initial launch was by providing rich destination, activity and theme guides written by their editorial team. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Away.com, About.com, and Concierge.com in its richness. The next phase is to help people move from inspiration to planning through this widget, via a button located in the blank space above the print button:

Once the items are “clipped”, they can likely be added to itineraries, or dream lists, that can be organized and shared with other people. It seems that TravelMuse believes that planning trips “collaboratively with your friends and family” and “store all your travel research in one place” are the key things people are looking for in travel planning tools.

Because TravelMuse’s content is tagged, its likely to that trip planning tools will make recommendations for additional tagged activities in their database. Since their goal is to help people “get ideas of where to travel — based on likes or dislikes,” I speculate there will be more voting features available to allow users to indicate their preferences as they are browsing.

We’ll see if I’m right. By the way, they have a number of editorially-driven themes and activities. In fact, they even have one activity called “sleep” — a vacation activity that I long for!

NileGuide (aka The Nile Project)

Nile Guide is relatively more stealthy, but also promises to “revolutionize the way we all plan travel — one trip at a time.”

(Disclosure: we are not in any discussions with Nile Guide at this time and this is based solely on public information and speculation.)

Like UpTake (formerly Kango) and TravelMuse, Nile Guide recognizes that travel is NOT just about Air, Car, and Hotel:

Josh Stenitz is CEO of the Nile Project, Inc. aka Nile Guide, and formerly an executive at Cendant Partner Marketing, Away.com, and Parthenon Group. His co-founder John Monson was an Intuit executive in the mid-90s. John’s LinkedIn profile describes the company as follows:

We’re revolutionizing how travelers plan trips. Our website, NileGuide provides travelers with highly relevant recommendations for hotels, restaurants, sights, activities and nightlife. Travelers select the places they want to go and can drag and drop them into an itinerary and see their trip in a calendar, map or list. And, they can print a custom guide for their trip to take with them.

Norm Rose at Travel Technology Blog first blogged about Nile Project on 11/29/2006:

The consumer explicitly choosers an area of interest, then by using Ajax, the Nile project presents the consumer a limited number of preferences related to those interest. The application uses an Ajax slider (chose a value within a range) allowing the consumer to rate an attribute on a scale (e.g. cost from budget to most expensive). These than act as dynamic filters that present content that meets a consumer’s requirements. Additionally the site acts as an aggregator of ratings from other sites (e.g Trip Advisor, Travelpost). As with other Travel 2.0 sites, trips can be shared with friend, relatives and travel companions. Once the itinerary is set, the Nile Project creates a customized itinerary in a PDF file so the consumer can take it along with them on the trip.

And at AboutUs.org,

We’re developing a revolutionary way to plan great travel experiences combining personalized recommendations with interactive planning tools and custom guidebook creation. Check back soon to start experiencing the best travel planning the web has to offer!

We believe they are ready to come out of private Beta any day now, and we expect to see some interesting Ajax sliders (first made famous by Kayak) to refine the recommendations that they make to users. Unlike a more traditional “clip” widget like TravelMuse (or what we are planning at UpTake), Nile Guide is likely to come out with some “drag and drop” controls that allow you to pick travel products and drop them into a “bucket” or “wallet” or “folder” of some sort. Then that folder will support various views, like list view, chronological view, map view, or calendar view.

Yahoo! Trip Planner

Hardly new to the scene, Yahoo! Trip Planner launched in July 2006 and as of December 2006, there were 600,000 itineraries in Yahoo! Trip Planner already.

But this TripPlanner, with Farechase air ticket metasearc, Flickr photos, and Yahoo! Answers integration, is a great example of the potential of travel planning tools.

You can create trips with lodging and activities on the trip. I created a trip to Grand Bahama Island for my family (it was a destination wedding). 39 people gave this itinerary the thumbs up!

I was dreaming about going to the 2008 Olympics but unfortunately I’m too busy with this startup to go!

In the trip plan, you can bookmark hotels and activities…

I added “swim with the dolphins” at UNEXSO because the database did not have that product.

The travel plan also links to the hotel guides that Yahoo! has:

I expect that NileGuide and TravelMuse will take the best of Yahoo! Trip Planner and try to top it. TravelMuse will be more oriented toward destinations, activities, and themes (including sleep!) and NileGuide will be more oriented toward rich internet application (RIA) style controls that will allow for drag and drop functionality. Think NetVibes meets Yahoo! Travel Planner.

How does UpTake fit in?

As a meta-search engine for destinations, activities, and lodging, we intend to build a comprehensive index of all travel information. We will enable users to express their preferences so we can match them to the best products and sites. We can work well with TravelMuse and NileGuide by linking to editorial or user-generated content on their site, and thus enabling these new services to be discoverable alongside TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist, Expedia, MyTravelGuide, Fodors and many other existing travel sites.

I would love to explore integrating our data with 3rd party planning tools, so we can provide lots of choices of travel planning tools for the diverse set of lifestyles and trip types that we will support. For example, family reunions might choose TripHub, destination weddings might choose Wedding Mapper, and other groups might choose Nile Guide. An open systems approach might be interesting, but may not be for some time as everyone is just focused on getting a good product to market.

Anyone who has seen TravelMuse or NileGuide willing to spill the beans on what they are doing? (Just kidding–we’re dying of curiosity but don’t violate your NDAs please)