Travel on the Web has always been a natural fit both in terms of commerce and community: It’s not a physical product, the buying decision is information heavy and people love to share their vacations with you. From a Web 2 perspective the same general trends are reflected in the travel vertical as in the wider Web – Aggregation and Social Networks.
Aggregation and comparison engines fit directly into the commerce side of travel and whilst there is some pretty great technology involved here it’s the next logical step to Ecommerce in travel. The Web 1 big boys such as Expedia and Travelocity are being challenged on one side by the aggregators and on other side by the providers (that is to say the actual companies who own the hotels, airlines etc and who are now catching up on their Web offerings). For examples of these see Kayak, Farechase (acquired by Yahoo), Opodo and locally here in Barcelona, HotelAdicto (HotelAdicto shares the same founder as Linkara, where I work) and Trabber.
The activity within Travel Community is a lot more diverse, bringing us travel focussed Social Networks, Reviews, blogs and Video. Additionally, mobile creates interesting new possibilities and the crossover of the exploding Local sector will begin to offer an attractive alternative to travellers.
Where Are You now? has to be the poster child of this wave of 2.0 travel communities, if only for the staggering amount of money it has raised. WAYN focuses very strongly on the social, empowering users to find each other and communicate via WAYN mail, chat and SMS. WAYN is also interesting because it goes against the trend of open and free and is a closed network that to get the best out of it you have to upgrade to its premium features. Whilst I can see that a closed network may make the site better for users by keeping out the over casual user, in the long term I’m not too certain that the emphasis on premium services won’t be an obstacle to growth and to WAYN sustaining and growing it’s obviously high valuation.
Gusto’s tagline is ‘Travel + lifestyle’. I don’t know what it means either. The site is review and information centric, offering social book marking like del.icio.us and users can place the ‘Gusto Grabber’ to facilitate this. I like that they allow me to import my photos from Flickr,Yahoo! photos and even Picassa.
RealTravel bills itself as the site of Real People, Real Advice and Real Experiences. From this slogan and the look of the site I’d say it is aiming and an older demographic. Alongside the user generated content there is a recommendation tool, offering to match you with your perfect holiday destination (and associated content).
Travelistic differentiates itself by being a video only travel site, collecting videos from users and independent producers, the latter seeming to be the most prevalent. Whilst the site is attractive and has all the usual video features that you would expect it does lack content although I can’t see when they launched.
TravelPost aspires to be the TripAdvisor killer, focussing on Hotel Reviews and doing a good job. It has the cleanest interface of all the sites I’ve looked at here and they offer a more focussed, clearer proposition to the user. I like their approach to blogs, offering distinct formats within their own categories – in this case Hotel Reviews and Itineraries. This is clever as it amplifies the opportunities for user involvement – the free form blog post is often the least attractive option for users who would like to share a specific experience, but do not want to create a long-term blog.
TravelHiker certainly looks the most Web2 of all the sites here. I particularly like the search on the front page giving you the option to search on Opinions, Trips or Members which serves at the same time to explain the site. Additionally they have a Trips offered or wanted section where you can offer or seek information or even a travel companion. Travelhiker also offers users to share in the AdSense earnings of the content they create, you just add your Adsense account details. TravelHiker certainly looks good, whilst it is packed with features has great usability and out of all the sites I’ve seen has a genuine excitement for travel, or to put it another way, feels less corporate.
This is just a selection of Travel Communities, I’ve started adding new ones as they come up – you can track them through my del.icio.us tag ‘travel‘. There are going to be many new travel communities -within Travel there are many niches to be served. It will also be interesting how the well established travel communities like TripAdvisor and VirtualTourist respond to these new upstarts. I also believe that the overlap from the Local Sector is significant. As local sites such as Yelp create ever deeper content they become interesting as travel resources offering up-to-the-minute reviews of places by locals rather that tourists who are just passing through. I know which one I’d prefer to consult if I’m heading to a new place.
