Vacations Blog

In a world of unwritten rules, one would never attempt to eat sushi with a fork or show up to a job interview wearing a costume unless you happen to be applying for a position as a clown (or wanting to be clowned).

One particular travel site, however, is taking a different approach than the rest of the players in an elite group of meta search engines in the online travel space. Mobissimo has embraced social networking and personalization tools to a degree that far exceeds its competitors (Kayak, Sidestep and Farecast).

I checked out Mobissimo’s Share Space called MobiShare (available directly on a tab on Mobissimo’s home page). Powered by Plum, this area of the site allows visitors to create a space to share all their travel-related urls, images, videos, notes or documents. It’s like a scrapbook of travel ideas. With MobiShare you can create shared folders where friends can contribute and anyone on the site can comment on the content or discover new places to visit.  MobiShare adds to Mobissimo’s MobiFriends travel community where you can meet travelers from around the world and share the fares you find on Mobissimo.

Other than including a “Deals” section on their sites, true meta search engines have been known to keep a minimalist’s approach in design so that the main focus is on their bread and butter – search. However, with travelers taking fewer trips this year, consumers want to make sure they’re getting the most out of every trip so Mobissimo’s strategy to differentiate by adding a fully integrated social networking component may well pay off.

Historically, Kayak/Sidestep and Farecast (with much greater funding) have had stronger overall U.S. traffic growth than Mobissimo, whereas Mobissimo has had stronger international brand awareness. As a result, Mobissimo’s social networking initiative to grow organically within its own ecosystem may also prove to be a good sticking point for its worldwide user base, keeping visitors engaged longer and driving incremental customer acquisition.

Hello world! We’re working on some very exciting ideas about how to make travel planning (all the stuff you do before you actually get to go on vacation) significantly better. What you see on Kango.com today is a pale shadow of what we are working on in our proverbial Silicon Valley garage.

Well, HP’s garage is pretty expensive Palo Alto real estate today…more than we can afford! So we’ll be starting Kango, Inc. in some rental space not too far away.

Anyway, until we’re ready to give birth to our beta baby, we’ed like to find other fellow travelers who are passionate about travel, and have a specific focus around their travel. It could be around activities or hobbies that they really care about: surfing, skiing, water-sports, etc. Your focus might be around a specific lifestyle, cause or reason for travel: ecotourism, adventure travel, family-oriented vacations. The only prerequisite is that you really care about doing something (even if that’s just relaxing) that results in a great travel experience. If you’re one of these people, we’ed love to enroll you in our project–to create a great travel website that helps you get the most out of your vacation time.

I’m Elliott Ng, the first official Kango at Kango, Inc. I’ll write a post to introduce myself (actually is anyone reading this post not someone I already know?) and share about some of my travel passions. Hope you’ll be interested in what we are doing and helping out!

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