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.

TravelMuse Planner
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!