Let me present an idea to you. Imagine a web service/site that enhances the travel experience in the following ways:
1) By enabling you to better plan where to stay and what to do visually on a personalized map (e.g., where hotels are located relative to sites you want to see, and sites are located relative to each other).
2) By tapping into recommendations from "like minds" and "friends of friends" to provide better qualified recommendations of where to stay, how to get there, what to do and where to eat.
3) By helping you find travel partners with compatible interests prior to your trip and coordinate meet ups with fellow travelers during your trip.
4) By allowing you to capture and share travel moments via mobile camera phones and blog journal entries, and keep friends/family updated about your travels via email and the web.
All of the pieces already exist. Friend of a friend and like minds types of user profile models, including lookup and hookup functionality have been adopted in several different applications, such as LinkedIn, Tribe.net and Friendster. Sites like SuperPages allow you to plot pins in a map, and Microsoft offers a very robust MapPoint Web Service for building custom mapping applications. Both travel and local listings sources are in abundant supply. The Meetup web site is a good example of online community web sites driving physical world connections around specific but common purposes.
Somewhere between 20-40 million camera phones shipped this year and that number is going to mushroom to 1 billion people down the road a bit, making moblogging almost ready for prime time.
Mind you, the Expedia's of the world have done a pretty good job capturing the ticketed transactions side of the sandbox, and the Fodor's of the world offer pretty good travel content, so the devil's advocate might be inclined to say, "good enough."
What's your take? Is there a need? Hard or easy to build?
Does this application resonate? Do other solutions solve the same problem for you?
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Web
Comments (5)
Read More Entries by Mark Sigal.
travel planning service idea
Thanks for your perspective. Mark
travel planning service idea
It would be "good enough" for me.
Rod K.
Travel Planner
Hi,
This blog, a serendipitous find on New Year's Day captures something and after checking the verdada site, offers something that is much needed and profound in its potential impact on web applications.
The fact that most of the millions of people who use the web as consumers of sites and potential applications are themselves frightened of their computer and scared of anything that may cause it to stop working.
What is means is that the top 2 percent know what to do when a PC malfunctions and the remaining 98% have a love hate relationship.
True computer penetration of social life and mores will occur when the practical application of concentrating information in a manner that resembles a notepad of notes and Post_it Notes is created that allows them to act on what they have found.
What has been perfected in real terms is that we finally have cash registers and check out counter's that work for the hearty fearless purchaser and Web user, but the aisles and end of aisles displays that lead to exactly what browsers are looking for is far from perfect.
For the past three years we have struggled with an online reservation application servicing secure reservations to independent accommodations and the stories would make you weep.
Much more remains to be done and yes Barry Diller's minions have built an impressive cash register for those who already know; but for the majority their site architecture and inability to drill down to local level information that can be captured in a real itinerary for real people that do not have personal assistants to make everything come out right are primitive at best.
There is much to be done to move beyond priding ourselves on a billboard driven display counter and cash register that is automated for the savvy while ignoring the other 49 million ( 50 million savvy online consumers) who fear that their computer will eat their homework literally and bankrupt them with identity theft.
David Jonah
www.moncton.localintheknow.com
Surviving with LP
Hi Allan,
Thanks for the thoughts. I agree with the basic take that some aspects of the service would be limited to North America and Europe, and even in Europe there is some question as to the quality and consistency of local listing data.
As to the checkmytrip link, for the booking side of things this is good enough, but it doesn't even touch the service of the meat of a trip; namely, what to do, where to eat and when to do these things from an itinerary perspective. Like I say in the blog. I think the ingredients exist but the recipe has yet to be cobbled together.
To your thought on Expedia, it seems that something akin to Google AdSense where keyword targeted offers can match to the elements in your trip itinerary and blog, would plug right in without any development/integration requirements.
Mark
Surviving with LP
I think there is a need, I am currently surviving with my lonely planet guide, excellent though it is, visual shots would be nice. The publishing cycle of books often means the info can be a little dated.
If you book through a big reservation system, such as Amadeus. You can view your itinerary through www.checkmytrip.com, here's the sample itinerary page https://www.checkmytrip.com/ITN/ItinerarySummaryServlet.
Linking these hotel addresses etc to geo co-ordinates would seem to be a little difficult outside of N.America and Europe, for example when I was pondering in a similar vein earlier in the year Webraska were mapping Brasil and were offering location services.
Also when booking with Expedia I often see special offer or similar stuff at the end of the process. So an anonymous itinerary may be of use to 3rd parties after your hard earned money. They may want to offer special offers to people on a cruise, sailing into Vancouver or wherever.
Allan