Vacations Blog

So you spend $18,500 to launch with 70+ startups on a big, prestigious launch event.  Then blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t even going to be there because he is watching another 50+ startups at another launch event, says that almost all the 70+ Websites that are part of that show basically sucks.  Its enough to make a grown man cry.

Well, Robert, TravelMuse doesn’t suck.  In fact, Travolution said if TravelMuse sucks, then there isn’t hope for 100s of others. And according to travel industry blogger Alex Bainbridge, they are unveiling their secret plans, showing the world they are more than Yet Another Travel Content Site (YATCS?) and in fact are rolling out workflow tools to aid travelers in the complex travel planning process.  Well maybe Robert Scoble didn’t get it, but we’ve been on to TravelMuse’s secret plans for world domination for some time now, and blogged about it here, here, and here.  That’s why we partnered with them!

TravelMuse launches TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner is the next installment in the suite of planning tools TravelMuse is developing.  Here’s a screenshot from their press kit that shows how the TravelMuse planner allows multiple people to collaborate on trip planning if they are all part of TravelMuse.

Once you have created multiple itineraries, you can manage them in a queue using drag-and-drop to rearrange and move them around.

It’s a logical extension of what TravelMuse has already done with the bookmarking widget that we’ve choosen to incorporate into the UpTake site, even in advance of our own pre-alpha trip folder feature.  It allows you to bookmark content from across the Web–including the hotels, alternative lodging, things to do, beaches and restaurants at UpTake– and manage and save all of that into one trip itinerary or many.  Trip plans can be managed by dragging and dropping different items from one day to another.  Then you can manage the trip planning process with your friends and family who are involved in the process.  Sharing out the trip plans with friends and family will allow everyone to contribute their ideas.

How is this different from TripIt and other itinerary tools?

By combining TravelMuse Planner with their Inspiration Finder and Bookmarking Widget, TravelMuse aims to be useful during the early-stages of trip planning, before anything is even booked.  In our own research, we have found that people do a tremendous amount of trip planning, in fact visiting over 22 sites and using Web search over 12 times, according to a comScore/Google study.  Post-booking organizational tools like TripIt are fundamentally different from TravelMuse because they are looking to help you organize your itinerary AFTER you have booked it.  So you could conceivably use both TravelMuse and TripIt.  Dopplr is probably more useful in the early planning stage, but its really about discovering what your friends are doing and doesn’t have the same bookmarking tools that TravelMuse has.  Dopplr’s strength is that it comes bundled with a social network.  TravelMuse, like TripIt, requires you to email invite your friends to share your itinerary.  On the other hand, my wife won’t even use Facebook and I don’t have any friends on Dopplr anyway (friend me please!) so maybe this isn’t such a big advantage.

Solving the Travel Planning problem is hard–its going to take a village to be successful!

We’ve been happy to work with TravelMuse because they have an open, collaborative approach and share our philosophy that its going to take many different approaches, and lots of consumer choice, before travel planning can improve in a big way.  Our travel meta-search approach is complementary with TravelMuse because once you’ve made a decision with UpTake, you still need the find the right tool for the right job.  There is no way that UpTake alone can provide enough for everyone to complete the trip planning process, and we think the TravelMuse Planner provides a great choice for people to inspire, to plan, and to share trip planning information so they can have better vacations.

Congrats to the TravelMuse team for another exciting chapter in their launch!

UpTake’s mission is to provide the best way to sift and filter through all the travel information, lodging options, and attractions that people need plan a great trip. But in our research, we’ve learned that trip-planning is a complex, circuitous workflow that can differ based on the type of trip or the type of traveler. TravelMuse is one of those companies that are trying to tackle this complex process.

Question: What’s new with TravelMuse?

TravelMuse just announced a new trip planning widget called “Plan-It!” that is kind of like the “Delicious” of travel. You can bookmark pages that you see on the Web and pull it into your TravelMuse Planner.

Question: Isn’t this competitive with UpTake?

No, in fact its complementary. UpTake has already created the comprehensive catalog of travel content out there, based on over 1000 sites. If you are using UpTake, why wouldn’t we you to bookmark our content so you can find it again?

Question: Does this mean you won’t create a trip planner or a bookmarking tool?

No, we never promised to Kevin (TravelMuse’s CEO) that we wouldn’t also have a bookmarklet or planner! In fact, we have one in private alpha. But our philosophy is to give our users choice, and when Kevin came to us with this option, we wanted to stay true to our philosophy by offering access to 3rd party tools like TravelMuse.

Actually, what we really want to focus on is a tool that will allow our users to post reviews to whatever site they are already using. We want to keep our platform open and complementary, and only in that way will we create a great service for travel planners out there.

Question: How does it work?

Over the last week, according to our Google Analytics, one of our top 50 destinations is Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So lets say you are looking for Gatlinburg Hotels, and you discover the MountainLoft which has some pretty good reviews at TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Orbitz, and Yahoo:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you see the Plan-It widget:

The Plan-It Widget pops you to a new page on TravelMuse that allows you to add it to a Trip Plan. The name of the hotel and the link have already been added:

Note that you don’t have to sign up to use this. That’s pretty slick. You just enter your email and TravelMuse will partially register you pending email confirmation. I already have an account, so I’ll log in and add it to a new trip plan. I repeated this process with some activities I found in UpTake, like the Gatlinburg Space Needle, Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies, Gatlinburg Guiness World of Records.

Once I’m at TravelMuse, I can add more information based on what I found in TravelMuse, to the TravelMuse Planner.

This is a partner friendly solution because the links in the TravelMuse planner go back to UpTake, where people can book their trip. Of course, in the process of exploring the editorialicious travel content of TravelMuse, you may find other hotels or activities to book!

This is just the beginning of our experiment in taking an open source approach toward travel innovation, and partnering with other visionary companies to solve the huge, complex problem of travel planning!

What other cool features does TravelMuse have?

This is what Jennifer Hwang of TravelMuse said:

• Original editorial content written by seasoned journalists and local experts
• Destination guides with more than 100,000 points of interest, plus stunning photography
• Inspiration Finder helps people discover and plan their best trips based upon their specific wants, needs and constraints
• TravelMuse Planner provides a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research.

TravelMuse has done an exceptional job integrating Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos into their site. They also have nice destination guides for the top destinations.

Look forward to working even more closely with TravelMuse and other travel planning companies in the future.

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!

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)