innovative travel business plans

 

• AirBed And Breakfast Takes Pad Crashing To A Whole New Level

 

Next up: tourism & travel.

1. Baby brand space: Acknowledging that travelling with infants can be a strain on both parents and children, Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport just opened Schiphol Babycare Lounge by Nutricia. Located in the airport’s main departure terminal, the lounge is (as the name indicates) a co-branding effort by Schiphol and Nutricia, a Dutch baby food ... More »
2. Facilitating cab shares to the airport: Everyone loves New York, except for when they have to take a cab to or from the airport and it ends up costing almost as much as airfare. Which is why smart New Yorkers are starting to plan their airport commutes via Hitchsters.com. Founded by New York attorney Terry ... More »
3. Sightseeing on the run: There are close to 40 million runners in the United States alone, according to Running USA, and it's a pretty safe bet than nearly all of them travel at least once in a while. When they do, City Running Tours can show them the sights while helping them get ... More »
4. Remote wardrobe service for travelling luggage-free: Door-to-door luggage delivery services have been sprouting up around the world, helping air travellers avoid the hassles of waits at baggage carousels, searches by security staff and lost luggage. Newcomer FlyLite takes the concept a few steps further. The company not only ... More »
5. High design, low touch hotel: Qbic, a Dutch 'no frills chic' hotel chain that soft-launched this week, is using innovations in design and service to offer guests a new hotel experience, and investors an efficient approach to converting vacant real estate into hotels. On the surface, the hotel's most radical innovation is placing everything ... More »
6. Enhanced networking for business travellers: Following our post on airline KLM’s successful attempts at creating social network platforms for frequent flyers, we were alerted to a start-up that aims to do something similar. While KLM’s Club China and Club Africa are destination-focused—connecting people who are doing business in specific regions—PairUp matches business travellers headed ... More »
7. Helping parents travel lighter: Flying with infants brings an end to travelling light, as a baby's essentials quickly add up to excess baggage. tinytotsaway.com aims to ease the strain, by letting parents order all of their child's necessities online and have them delivered to their holiday destination. The British company not only helps ... More »
8. Pintsized interns at Tokyo hotel: A while back, we featured a theme park that focused on giving children a taste of various careers by putting them to work for a day. While Kidzania is firmly grounded in the realms of make-believe, elementary-schoolers in Tokyo had a more realistic option this summer. For a ... More »
9. Motorcycle taxis rescue stranded business travellers: Business travellers stuck in traffic on their way to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport were in luck last week, as knights in shining leather were ready to zip them off to their flight on the back of a motorcycle. Three yellow bikes covered the busiest roads near Amsterdam between 7 and ... More »
10. Translation cards for travellers with allergies: Travellers with food allergies or other dietary restrictions, who don't want their diets to get in the way of enjoying international culture and cuisine, are now catered to by Canadian Allergy Translation Cards. The company's credit card-sized printouts can be customized to suit a person's dietary needs and travel ... More »

 

 

 

 

Business Travel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cruise Ship Industry

 

 

 

Cruises for the mass class »

 

 

If you live in Europe, you must have heard of easyCruise by now, yet another low fare concept from the people that already brought cost-conscious Europeans easyJet, easyCar, easyHotel and more. With the launch of the 289-foot-long easyCruiseOne on May 6th in Nice, France, budget travelers will soon be able to invade the playgrounds of the rich and famous on one-week itineraries that allow them to embark and depart at any port along the route, provided they stay onboard for at least two nights. Targeting passengers in their 20s, 30s and 40s who have not previously considered travel on a conventional cruise, the easyCruiseOne itinerary covers St. Tropez, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Imperia (for San Remo), Genoa and Portofino. The ship's six decks include a Caffe Ritazza, an American-style Sports Bar, and a Tapas Bar with a live DJ on some evenings. There will also be an outdoor six-person jacuzzi on deck. All food and beverage will be sold on an a la carte basis.

Cabins are available in three categories, with 72 twins, 6 quads and 4 suites. For passengers who want their cabin cleaned or bedding and towels changed during the course of their cruise, there will be an optional housekeeping charge of USD 20 (GBP 10 / EUR 15) payable on board. If easyCruise proves successful, another 4-6 ships may be added to the fleet by 2010, cruising not only the Mediterranean but possibly Caribbean and Australian waters as well.

 

Opportunities

While easyCruise's tag line "CRUISE INTO THE PLAYGROUND OF THE RICH & FAMOUS" initially conjures up fantastic images of horrified jet setters taking to their Wallies to escape the very orange easyCruiseOne, the company's vision could play out well. It capitalizes on changes in travel patterns and a predicted growth in the cruise market of 6 new million new customers in the next few years. The fact that up to 80% of all Northern American and European households have never taken a cruise, doesn't hurt either.

On a grander scale, easyCruise could change the dynamics of a somewhat conservative industry. After all, boats may have gotten better and more luxurious, but the product itself has shown remarkably little innovation, and remains geared toward a run-of-the-mill audience, sustaining a fairly un-cool image of what could be a really fun or hip way to spend a part or all of one's holiday. Naturally, easyGroup's low fare airline division easyJet will also benefit from flying aspiring cruise passengers to Mediterranean ports. With tourists going on short breaks non-stop and year-round, adding a few nights on a cruise ship should appeal. Other cruise companies to follow? And on a grander scale: which industry will succumb to the low fare revolution next?

 

 

 

 

Travel Web 2.0

 

I love it when you see a "2.0" on the end of a market. It shows that the marketing people are desperately trying to come up with new technologies to sell that market ;-)

 

Trip advisor showed the way, but the problem is that then every travel company wants social networking features or reviews etc. and it all becomes a bit of a yawn.

 

Most people have forgotten that Web 2.0 is the semantic web and view it as social networking.

 

I would far prefer that this looks at how technology can improve the experience of the traveler and in which traveler sector (business, leisure, self plan, package etc.) and in which part of the travel cycle the person is in (planning, buying, transit, location etc.)

 

Certainly the travel market has a long way to go. My preference for the business/self planner is much more intelligent route planning across multiple transport methods especially when your destination is not at a transport hub.

 

In location services with mobile will start coming through and there is alot that can be done with customer services and alerts.

 

Bottom line go back to the original principles of web 2.0, analyze what is lacking in each travel niche and the answers will be there.

 

Finally all the leisure players can put reviews on their sites (yawn again).

 

Here is a list of 2.0 companies:

 

1st Home Exchange http://www.1sthomeexchange.com/

BootsnAll http://www.bootsnall.com/

Cleartrip http://www.cleartrip.com/

Couchsurfing http://www.couchsurfing.com/

Farecast http://www.farecast.com/

Flyspy http://www.flyspy.com/

Groople http://www.groople.com/

Gusto http://www.gusto.com

ITA http://www.ita.hr

Kayak http://www.kayak.com/

MakeMyTrip www.makemytrip.com

Mobissimo http://www.mobissimo.com/

MP3Travel http://www.mp3travel.com/

Paguna https://www.paguna.com/

Pastigo pastigo.com

Quixo http://www.quixo.com/

Real Travel http://realtravel.com/

Rezgo http://www.rezgo.com/

SideStep http://www.sidestep.com/

SnapJot http://www.snapjot.com/snapjot/

Suggest for Travel http://suggest4travel.com/

Travelguru

TravelPost

TripCart http://www.tripcart.com/

TripConnect.com tripconnect.com

TripHub http://www.triphub.com/

Tripmojo http://tripmojo.com/

Tripology http://www.tripology.com/

TripTie http://triptie.com/

VCarious http://www.vcarious.com/

Viator

Virtual Tourist http://www.virtualtourist.com/

WAYN http://www.wayn.com/

Yatra

 

 

What Travel 2.0 is all about

 

Travel 2.0 is all about:

 

• Who are my network - friends vs professional?
• Who is in this location now?
• Where have my friends been and what would they recommend?
• What do I recommend and where would I return?
• How can I find a good restaurant and get a booking?
• How can I set up an event for customer, team or myself?
• How can I avoid people that I network with but whom I don't wish to spend social time with?
• How do I avoid work contact when I am on the beach with my family but still retain Travel 2.0 capability using a different profile?

 

 

Making a better travel website

 

 

Travel log startup Driftr plays up clean interface, better organization

If you want to share your travels with friends and family check out Driftr. The service is in alpha testing, but you can request an invitation.

Driftr lets you detail your past trips or those in progress, ranking places to eat, places to stay and attractions. It includes a blog for each day of the trips you create.

 

Erick Laubach, one of the founders and developers, says that the site targets the younger generation with a slick, easy to use design. It uses a custom made world map to appease the eyes as opposed to a drab Google map, keeps the advertising discrete, and showcases a sizeable quantity of colorful pictures (about eight thousand total right now; remember this is an early alpha).

The company has plans for several improvements in subsequent alpha releases, such as linking to friends and the ability to invite anyone to the service.

 

Competitors, such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, may have a commanding presence in the crop of travel sites, but even with their vast quantities of information, they may not prove quite so competitive on the design front. Their interfaces are not very attractive, the quality of the content is left to the user to parse through, and they bombard users with excessive advertising.

 

Laubach says he wants to build something useful and entertaining and has no grand plans to take over the industry or flip the company. It’s a service built by people who had a need for it in their personal lives, he says.

 

Driftr was developed part-time by three developers based out of the Los Angeles area over the last four months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Airlines

 

 

 

 

 

Social Networking

 

Secondly, social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut and others will allow friends from all over the world to instantly connect with each other. Just last night on my way back to Subic Bay (Philippines) from Manila, I sat beside a group of young Americans, Dutch and Hong Kong tourists who were going to Subic Bay as well. They asked me a lot of questions on what's the best places to visit in Subic and I answered them to the best of my abilities. After which we exchanged email addresses and Facebook account names so that they can become my tourist guides as well when I come to visit their respective countries.

 

I believe that scenario will only increase as more of the youth today hook up and become friends with anyone anywhere on the planet. It will spawn a new era in travel and tourism where you can build friendships and even romantic relationships the world over.

 

 

Mobile Phones / PDA's & Travel

 

With the mobile guide we will have a completely guided tour automatically adjusting to our preferences. It will navigate us. Based on our preferred level of depth it will provide audiovisual guidance for the sites we are in. It will buy bus tram ferry and train tickets for us while bringing us to the stations on time. Book dinners and entertainment features for us, and will continue learning what we like and dislike and where have we been and don't like to go back again and will plan the journey for us.

 

see:  http://www2.bremen.de/wuh/umts/Kap1/docs/liraz.pdf

 

 

 

 

Location mapping "Yelp" style

 

see yelp

 

more:  local reviews

 

Dopplr tests traveller tips sharing

Posted: 03 Dec 2007 10:48 AM CST

Dopplr, the UK-based social network for global travelers, is testing a new feature on some of its members which might make the Yelps and Trusted Places of this world sit up and take notice. The new Dopplr feature lets you share tips and recommendations on cities - usually a core feature of location-based social networks. Core Dopplr members are being given access to the feature this week prior to a wider roll-out.

So for instance, as well being able to see who in your network is travelling to Paris this month, you can also see any tips they have on the city. For instance, under Paris, Co-Founder Matt Biddulph has put “Le Potager du Marais vegetarian restaurant… Traditional French dishes done vegetarian.”

However, Biddulph denied the intention with this new feature was to create a “listings” style section:

What we hope people will write in their tips is things like “Walk along the cliffs at Bronte Beach” for Sydney, rather than just reviewing restaurants. It’s all about sharing travel experiences, not creating a directory. A big part of this test phase is to see how testers react to the plain entry form as it is right now. Then we’ll decide how much we need to add in the way of advice and examples.

So, perhaps not something to quite get the ‘networking around location’ startups too worried just yet, but certainly something they will be keeping their eye on.

 

 

Whrrl: Map and Mobile-Centric Social Reviews

Posted: 02 Nov 2007 07:43 PM CDT

Sometimes products are easy to sum up in single sentences, sometimes they are most definitely not. Whrrl, a new site by Pelago, is one of those that eludes definition. Hence, Pelago’s need to describe it unhelpfully as “a seamlessly integrated Web and mobile experience that is social, useful, and fun” (I admit, my headline’s not that much better).

 

Let’s start with the fundamentals and go from there. Whrrl is at heart a social network, as are many websites we see these days. But it’s a social network with a purpose (or, several related purposes, as we shall see). Members primarily use Whrrl to share their opinions and knowledge about local outfits, such as restaurants, bars, retail stores, and hotels. In the spirit of Yelp, users can find basic information about establishments and then, more importantly, share reviews of them (with brief descriptions and a star rating system). You can also write simple notes that correspond with particular locations, notes you can choose to share with all Whrrl members or just your friends.

 

 

Whrrl is also a mapping service of all the establishments that can be reviewed. After signing up for the site, half your screen will be dedicated to an interactive map provided by Google on top of which Pelago has dropped identifiers for your local establishments. Scan the map to find local outfits and click on their dots to pull up reviews and basic information about them. If a certain store or restaurant has been reviewed favorably or unfavorably overall, its dot on the map will indicate that fact. Opt to see indicators for establishments that have only been reviewed by your friends, or choose to view the map aggregating everyone’s contributions.

 

If you don’t want to find establishments using a map, you can use the Whrrl Sifter tool to perform a keyword search and then specify criteria (e.g, cheap, open now, baked goods, within 5 miles). No matter how you explore local destinations, Whrrl is intended primarily to help you share your experiences with friends. If you click on someone’s name anywhere that it is referenced, you’ll be shown on the map some of the places they have reviewed or rated.

 

Whrrl is also a mobile application for two main reasons: Pelago provides a full-featured version of the site for mobile devices, and soon you will be able to track your friends via GPS (if they let you). While most of the reviewing will take place on a computer (since many people don’t have mobile devices that make typing easy) you can access the site’s reviews on a map using your handheld. This makes it easier to figure out where to eat when you’re already out on the town. You can also post images and receive alerts about your friends activities from your phone. If your friend rates a place nearby, you can bookmark it for later.

 

As for the GPS, Whrll will be competing with other tracking services like Loopt to provide a way for your friends to find out where you are currently located. If you install the software on your phone and choose to share your location with friends on a white list, they will be able to see you real time on Whrrl’s map. Pelago says they have been working on a patented probablistic model to ensure that people’s locations are reported accurately. The system will report the actual establishments your friends are at, so you don’t even need to look at a map. The GPS functionality is all optional of course, and if you turn it on, the software on your phone will even ask you from time to time whether you still want it on. This is to prevent someone from tracking you without your knowledge.

 

As for the future of Whrrl, the company is adding more support for events. Currently you can use the system to tell your friends when you’ll be at a certain location. In the future, there will be more information in Whrrl associated with events (you’ll be able to add reviews of them, for instance). Pelago is also working on more ways to get information into the system. They contracted out to a team in the Philippines to manually collect all of the basic information about food and drink establishments currently in Whrrl. In the future, they will collect more information about non-restaurant establishments and eventually will turn the system into a wiki of sorts so users can edit most everything.

 

Pelago raised $7.4 million last November from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Trilogy Equity Partners. They are currently running a promotion campaign with American Eagle to get the word out to Whrrl’s target demographic, 18 to late 20 year olds. Robert Scoble recently recorded an interview with Pelago CEO Jeff Holden

 

 

Maps & Local reviews

 

Q&A with UpNext, a local search and mapping company

A four person start-up called UpNext has taken local search and mapping and added some very impressive twists — stepping right onto territory occupied by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

 

The New York City company has created a fully 3D map of Manhattan and made it easy to explore. As with any local search engine, you can search for businesses and specific locations, but with UpNext, that’s not really the point. With the ability to pan, zoom, and rotate the city map in any direction and add visual layers to find restaurants, hotels, transportation and recreation spots, UpNext allows you to investigate any neighborhood in the city without having to go there first. It is sort of like a combination of Google Earth and Virtual Earth mixed with a dose of video games, and it has a spotlight feature, which automatically highlights interesting locations as you browse a neighborhood. The layers are more refined than those of Google Earth. So for example, instead of looking generally for places serving food, which can get visually overwhelming, you can refine the search to find only lounges.

 

It has produced a Facebook app that replicates that map in the social network but adds the ability to tell your friends where you’ve gone, see where they’ve gone, read their reviews, and more. Today, we talked to the company’s four founders, led by Danny Moon. The Q&A is below.

 

 

 

 

Semantic Search for Travel ?

 

Kango makes travel search personal and raises $4mm

Kango, a travel search engine that finds lodging and activities that match your personal preferences, is launching a closed testing version and announcing that it raised $4 million from Shasta Ventures earlier this year.

 

This area is extremely competitive. Companies like Kayak and Sidestep, which search multiple sites for the best ticket prices, have raised millions from marquee VCs; cFares, which finds wholesale plane tickets at discount rates, recently raised $4.5 million. TripIt makes it easy to manage your travel plans and share them with others and raised $1 million. We recently used and like Farecast, which does much of this, and offers predictions too. The list goes on and on.

 

But Palo Alto’s Kango is doing something different. Rather than pricing airfare and hotels, it wants to help you plan what to do once you reach your travel destination. You can already do this using tree-based travel guides like Lonely Planet or by scouring thousands of small sites for recommendations from other travelers. But Kango wants to index these small sites and use semantic technology to detect what destinations and activities they cover, so someone looking for a family vacation in, say, Big Sur will see a different set of results than someone seeking romance or adventure.

 

Kango’s technology extracts the sentiment from the postings it indexes and only shows results for locations that get positive buzz. If you’re looking for activities, you can filter using a number of criteria, including theme parks, playgrounds, wineries and breweries, and spas.

 

In its current state, Kango only supports California and Hawaii and doesn’t expand beyond “family friendly” and “romantic.” The ability to search for “pet friendly, “historical,” “eco-friendly” and “thrill-seeking” destinations and activities is planned for later releases.

 

The company’s founder Yen Lee, who was a general manager for Yahoo Travel, has an insider’s perspective on the limitations of the online travel market and has used what he learned at Yahoo Travel to build a technology with a refreshing spin on travel search. With all of the money and brainpower behind online travel sites, it’s surprising something like Kango hasn’t come along sooner.

 

That said, getting users to visit yet another site as part of their travel planning process will be no mean feat. Once it’s fleshed out, it’d be great to see Kango’s services integrated into a larger platform that handles ticket search, booking, and TripIt’s central organization from one beautiful interface.

See our first mention of Kango here (scroll down).

 

 

 

 

Travel Technology

 

Travel technology is a term used to describe applications of Information Technology (IT), in travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Travel technology may also be referred to as tourism technology or even hospitality automation. Web 2.0 is a current buzzword in the travel technology community, used to describe various social software applications. XML is an increasingly important aspect of travel technology for handling metadata toward the semantic web.  

 

Since travel implies locomotion, travel technology was originally associated with the computer reservations system (CRS) of the airlines industry, but now is used more inclusively, incorporating the broader tourism sector as well as its subset the hospitality industry. While travel technology includes the computer reservations system, it also represents a much broader range of applications, in fact increasingly so. Travel technology includes virtual tourism in the form of virtual tour technologies. Travel technology may also be referred to as e-travel / etravel or e-tourism / etourism (eTourism), in reference to "electronic travel" or "electronic tourism".

 

 

Applications of Travel Technology

Travel technology includes many processes such as dynamic packaging which provide useful new options for consumers. Today the tour guide can be a GPS tour guide, and the guidebook could be an audioguide, podguide or I-Tours, such as City audio guides.

 

 

 

hotel industry

 

 

 

British easyGroup has set its sights on one of the missing links in its travel/entertainment empire: accommodation. Welcome to easyDorm!

After turning various industries upside down by launching the likes of easyJet, easyCar, and easyCinema, British easyGroup has now set its sights on one of the missing links in its travel/entertainment empire: accommodation. After all, if it's price-elastic, the easyGroup will go for it! Soon, after boarding orange easyJet planes, picking up an easyCar at the airport, and watching a movie in an easyCinema, consumers can get a good night's sleep in an easyDorm, all for next to nothing if booked well in advance.

Starting in London next year (New York and Paris could be next, source: USA Today), easyDorm will concentrate on providing accommodation only, and will not offer a restaurant or other services. Bedding and toiletries will be available for purchase for those customers who don't bring their own. Rooms will consist of pre-fabricated fibreglass units (nothing to break, no dirt accumulation), and come with a shower unit, a lavatory and floor mattresses inspired by Japanese tatami style bedding. An extra charge applies for those who choose not to clean their own room.

 

Opportunities

It will be highly interesting to see whether easyDorm can compete with more than just youth hostels and backpacker joints. It's entering a growing market though: there are around 60,000 rooms in the UK in budget hotels today, from less than 8,000 in 1992.

 

And changing travel and tourism patterns (not in the last place fuelled by sibling easyJet), with tourists going on short breaks non-stop and year-round, wanting to spend a minimum on transport and accommodation, and a maximum on experience, shouldn't hurt either.  Living in Paris, London, New York, Cape Town, LA or any other world city and want to get involved? On its website, the easyGroup invites anyone interested in participation to email them, so here goes: James Rothnie at james.rothnie@easyGroup.co.uk.  (Note: while we'd think easyDorm alone is a sizeable endeavor to pull off, the easyGroup is already planning easyPizza, easyBus and easyCruise. Springwise will track all of these new business ideas, and would like to thank easyGroup for the steady flow of inspiration;-)

 

 

 

 

Finding the perfect Hotel

 

Hotel search? Video completes the picture »

 

Launched a few weeks ago, Trivop claims to be the first online hotel video portal. Using Google maps to help users find hotels, the website gives them the next best thing to visiting a hotel in person—a video walkthrough. Each video begins with some street footage near the hotel. The video camera then takes the viewer up to the entrance and into the lobby and other public spaces, and on to a room. Videos are available for each of type of room a hotel offers (standard, deluxe, junior suite, etc), including shots of the bathroom and the view through the window. No running commentary, just some fairly innocuous background music. Additional information includes the five most recent reviews on TripAdvisor, a full street address and a link to the hotel's website.

French Trivop currently lists 144 hotels in Paris and 11 in London. Within a few weeks, the site will expand its reach by harnessing the power and video cameras of the masses. Travellers (and hotels) will be able to upload videos they've shot. In addition to amateur videographers, Trivop is also seeking freelance filmmakers to shoot professional videos: "Trivop is convinced that hotels must provide a video on their website. We want to open up many business opportunities for you by building the biggest community of filmmakers all around the world for the hospitality industry." About time, considering the very limited still and moving imagery most hotel websites offer. Thomas Owadenko, Trivop's founder, informs us that 500 filmmakers signed up over the past three weeks.

 

So besides the providing travellers with previews of hotels, Trivop will also tackle the B2B side by creating videos for hotels, or brokering between hotels and freelance filmmakers. With both professional and user-submitted candid videos, the website's visitors will benefit from the same kind of transparency that candid photos on TripAdvisor offer. Sources of revenue include production fees and hosting charges for hotel-directed videos, as well as referral fees. The company will also license its catalogue to online travel agencies. Trivop's main challenge is to build content and traffic quickly, since TripAdvisor (which has 20 million unique visitors each month and is owned by Expedia), started letting users upload videos last month. Watch this space!

Website: www.trivop.com

Contact: www.trivop.com/contact

 

 

 

 

 

Travel guide books

 

 

 

 

 

User-generated pod-tours »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Industry news:

 

Sidestep Acquires Travel Social Network TripUp

Posted: 09 Jul 2007 10:58 PM CDT

Travel search company SideStep has acquired social networking site TripUp for an undisclosed sum. TripUp is a social network focused on travel and includes user-generated travel blogs, photos, videos, maps, and travel reviews. SideStep had previously acquired user generated hotel ratings site TravelPost.com in October 2006. I spoke with SideStep CEO Rob Solomon prior to the announcement. Solomon sees the acquisition of TripUp as SideStep moving towards becoming a data intensive network; SideStep wants to become the leader in online travel related information. Solomon said that SideStep has a social networking (see tech trends)  strategy in place that as well as utilizing TripUp also includes facebook. SideStep already has two Facebook applications. The Trips Facebook application provides a trip planning service that currently has over 150,000 users. Extended Info allows users to add fields and categories of their own choice to a Facebook profile. SideStep is already developing a Facebook App for TripUp that should be launched later in the year. I pushed Solomon on the question of what SideStep gets out of Facebook, given the still lingering questions over many Facebook apps that seemingly lack any coherent business model. SideStep sees facebook as a customer acquisition vehicle. Solomon noted that although it is still early days in terms of what they are doing on Facebook, the company had already had over 1000 solid leads from their two Facebook apps, and expect this figure to rise rapidly as they improve their cross promotion strategies.

 

 

First Round Capital & Bay Partners Invests in Yapta

Posted: 09 Jul 2007 10:59 PM CDT

More travel startup news tonight after Sidestep’s acquisition of TripUp: Yapta, one of the many Seattle-based travel startups (see Farecast and TripHub too), is announcing its second round of venture capital - $2.3 million from First Round Capital, Bay Partners and other investors. The company has now raised a total of $3 million. Yapta, which launched in May, has a unique approach to saving people money on travel: The core of the Yapta service is a browser bookmarklet or addon that lets users “bookmark” fares that they find on major travel sites. Ten airline and travel sites are currently supported, and many more will be added over time. See a flight you are interested in and bookmark it. The flight and fare information is then stored in your account at Yapta. Find a number of different flight options at different sites, and then go back to Yapta to compare them. This is particularly useful when you fly Southwest or Jetblue, which do not provide flight information to other services. If the fare increases or decreases before you make a purchase, that will be reflected on the Yapta site. If you make a purchase by clicking through to the airline or travel site from Yapta, they’ll continue to monitor the price. If it falls, they’ll ping you and suggest you contact the airline for a refund or flight coupon. All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you.

 

 

 

6/20/07

- Saga, a UK travel and insurance company for people over 50, has agreed to merge with UK motoring group the Automobile Association (AA), in a £6.2 billion deal. Existing shareholders in the two companies will remain as investors in the combined enterprise. These include private equity houses Permira and CVC, which bought the AA from energy group Centrica in 2004, and Charterhouse Capital Partners, which owns Saga. Permira and CVC would hold a combined 42.5%, Charterhouse would hold 37.5% and company management would hold the remaining 20 percent.

 

- Trivop claims to be the first online hotel video portal. Using Google maps to help users find hotels, the website gives them the next best thing to visiting a hotel in person—a video walkthrough. Each video begins with some street footage near the hotel. The video camera then takes the viewer up to the entrance and into the lobby and other public spaces, and on to a room. Videos are available for each of type of room a hotel offers (standard, deluxe, junior suite, etc), including shots of the bathroom and the view through the window. No running commentary, just some fairly innocuous background music. Additional information includes the five most recent reviews on TripAdvisor, a full street address and a link to the hotel's website. French Trivop currently lists 144 hotels in Paris and 11 in London. Within a few weeks, the site will expand its reach by harnessing the power and video cameras of the masses. Travellers (and hotels) will be able to upload videos they've shot. In addition to amateur videographers, Trivop is also seeking freelance filmmakers to shoot professional videos: "Trivop is convinced that hotels must provide a video on their website. We want to open up many business opportunities for you by building the biggest community of filmmakers all around the world for the hospitality industry." About time, considering the very limited still and moving imagery most hotel websites offer. Thomas Owadenko, Trivop's founder, informs us that 500 filmmakers signed up over the past three weeks. So besides the providing travellers with previews of hotels, Trivop will also tackle the B2B side by creating videos for hotels, or brokering between hotels and freelance filmmakers. With both professional and user-submitted candid videos, the website's visitors will benefit from the same kind of transparency that candid photos on TripAdvisor offer. Sources of revenue include production fees and hosting charges for hotel-directed videos, as well as referral fees. The company will also license its catalogue to online travel agencies. Trivop's main challenge is to build content and traffic quickly, since TripAdvisor (which has 20 million unique visitors each month and is owned by Expedia), started letting users upload videos last month. Watch this space! Website: www.trivop.com

Contact: www.trivop.com/contact

 

 

 

 

News

 

VibeAgent: TripAdvisor 2.0

 

Posted: 19 Jul 2007 11:25 PM CDT

 

Any profitable sector of the internet is bound to draw the eyes of new startups. This is particularly the case for the $78.8 billion online travel industry. It’s spurred the development of over a dozen meta-search engines, trip trackers, and trip planning tools.

 

The latest travel site, VibeAgent, should look familiar to you. It’s TripAdvisor with a social networking twist. Like TripAdvisor, you can use the site to find, review, and book hotels (TripAdvisor also does flights). However, on TripAdvisor, every gets the same reviews. It can be hard to guess at motivations behind the poster, or how relevant they are to your tastes and preferences. They recently received an undisclosed seed round of funding from Trip Davis, President and CEO of the publicly traded TRX Inc.

 

VibeAgent helps add context to the reviews and search results by exposing the profiles of the reviewers and ranking search results based on your relationship to the reviewer. Reviews consist of text, ratings, and photos of the area. Every review is labeled by the person who posts it and ranked in search results with review by similar reviewers, friends, and members of groups you’ve joined pushed to the top. The idea is that these people have the opinions that you can trust and which are closest to your views. Of course, if you don’t join the system, they won’t have very many details to base their results on.

 

So far VibeAgent is sticking to hotels because they want to focus on purchases with subjective aspects. Flights are fairly commoditized, with pretty much every airline sticking you in the same cramped chair. Hotels are hard to assess from a price tag and even a photo, which is the reason VibeAgent wants to personalize reviews. Their next target will most likely be vacation homes.

 

One of the major problems review services have with getting of the ground is building a critical mass of reviews before it becomes a self sustaining community. Yelp has done it by focusing on a few metros and copious amounts of parties. VibeAgent, with their older crowd, plans on rewarding top users through “travel-related” rewards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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