DISQUS

Steve519 · 4 months ago

I would love this type of site. A quick and easy way to find which places best suit your wants.

Powers · 4 months ago

Love it. Have looked for and wanted a site like this for years. Just went through this again last week when trying to decide where to take a vacation in the fall.

Need to add "pollution", "kid friendly" and other fields. You also have to have a cross reference for "time of year" - because of seasonal difference.

billclyde · 4 months ago

Travel Ad Network has the ability to do this.

hauteroute · 4 months ago

Hi Mark,

Curious what you think of NileGuide? The sites enables you to find personalized travel recommendations in 130+ destinations, and also offers planning, booking, and create-your-own guide tools. It doesn't yet tell you where you should go, but that functionality is apparently coming down the pike as well.

Kevin Fliess · 4 months ago

Hi Mark,

Great post. As CEO of TravelMuse I'd like to just elaborate on your description of our solution.

http://www.travelmuse.com/inspire/

In addition to "time of year, budget, and activity" (we have more than 50 + to be exact) our travel destination finder, which we call the Inspiration Finder also takes into account:
- your home airport
- how far you're willing to travel
- how long you want to travel
- the ages of travelers
- the level of accommodation you desire (3 star, 4 star, etc.)
... and you can also enter the exact dates you wish to go, or specify the season.

We take this criteria and return results against a database of over 500 destinations with 200,000 points of interest. If you find a destination that strikes your fancy, you can begin researching and planning your trip immediately and even invite your co-travelers to help you. If you've got a credit card burning a hole in your pocket you even book straight away.

Oh, and if you're not *even sure you can afford to travel* you can use our trip budget calculator to see what kind of trip you can afford.

http://www.travelmuse.com/yaycations/

Your suggestions for evolving the destination finder concept are spot on but I also think we've got an excellent foundation upon which to build.

Thanks for letting me chime in.

Kevin Fliess

darwinw · 4 months ago

For a start, you can always go to http://tripntale.com to see travel experience shared by tons of real travelers.

jason · 4 months ago

Not really sure the idea would have legs other than a simple niche application.

However, I think you might want to look at the following (in this order):

Auckland, NZ
Wellington, NZ
Sydney, AUS

I have been going through the same things as you and I have been looking for just over a year. I am moving to Auckland as of June 2010. Should be a great adventure!

Reuven Levitt · 4 months ago

Hi Mark,

My name is Reuven Levitt and I’m the CEO of Tripbase.com

I think you are correct to want the system you describe, and your evaluation of the space is accurate. I also agree that the current product selection is very limited. Luckily, change is already here.

I’d like to introduce you to Tripbase.com (www.tripbase.com) and the Travel Genome Project (www.travelgenomeproject.com).

Tripbase was the pioneer in this space (Launched in early 2007) and remains the clear market leader. In 2008, Travel+Leisure named Tripbase as their top website for "destination ideas.". Although we are still in Beta, we think our system already does a pretty good job of matching individuals with a handful of appropriate destinations from among the over 20,000 locations currently in our system. The LA Times has written that "TripBase is the Match.com of travel planning" (Your eHarmony reference is very fitting).

We are currently working on adding many more parameters and destinations to our search (as the ability to search for what you want is clearly important). Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining techniques, we are able to collect information on thousands of parameters for tens of thousands of destinations in an efficient way. One of the key factors for us in adding parameters has been maintaining usability and simplicity since complexity quickly increases with the number of parameters offered. We believe that online travel research should be fun, engaging and, perhaps most importantly, useful.

Please give it a try. I would love to hear any feedback you have for us.
Feel free to email me if you would like to chat.

Sincerely,
Reuven Levitt
CEO & Co-Founder Tripbase.com

Kevin Dykes · 4 months ago

Mark - Great article - extremely well researched. I also applaud that you put a heavy emphasis on the API partner program as part of the foundation. In my opinion, it should be part of the early strategic development plan for all SaaS co's. In fact, for this idea, I see that as a go-to-market strategy prior to or instead of developing a destination site due to heavy costs of doing so.

A note to Reuven of Tripbase.com... yes, it would seem your app is definitely very close to Mark's article thesis. Nice job on your service. Your partner program seems to be providing a great value-proposition, but also seems to be friction laden & would require a heavy traditional outbound sales approach for success. A couple of thoughts... (disclaimer: I'm a bit of an strategy geek & I realize you may have some of this in place)

Open a tiered API as a means of filling your business development pipeline. Use a solution like http://www.3scale.net to manage the tiered versions of the API and to manage monetization of the premium versions. Not suggesting you change your partner revenue model exactly - only widen & lower the barrier to entry to work with your solution.

First tier would be limited-use, perhaps non-commercial for dev. uses only, limited function/result set, result set would push to your travel site or with usage/time limits. Regardless, this tier 1 freely-available API will foster developer interest & allow them to work with your solution and create innovative uses that perhaps your team has not yet thought of. This engaged group becomes your target for the business dev team - inbound marketing at very little cost.

Higher tiers or premium uses could be monetized via metered use, flat monthly fees, per call or some combination. This can ultimately model your current revenue model of the partner program - just with lower friction in the partner development process.

Lastly, integrate a write component to the API and allow the network effect of your API partners to aggregate an ever growing set of inbound (of-course curated) data - allowing all partners to benefit from each other. See BazaarVoice and how they've done this with their aggregated product reviews solution.