
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) - netvarun
http://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-common-bad
======
fesja
I was the founder of TouristEye, a travel guide app that makes trip planning
really easy. We got into 500Startups, we reached 500k registered travelers and
then we sold the company to Lonely Planet, the leader of the sector.

I see myself on this post. Several years ago we decided to build an amazing
trip planning, that allowed you to plan your trip day-by-day. You can see some
screenshots on the Chrome extension
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/touristeye-
planner...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/touristeye-
planner/kpjpejalhlnocbhggpnokneghfenoneg)) (not working now). We got over 100k
users using it on their trips (not daily users obviously). It was gorgeous,
people really loved it, Google really loved it, but the usage was pretty low.
Just 5% of our users used it.

So because we were a startup we decided to kill it and we focused on capturing
user wishes, and recommending those things for their trips (kind of Google Now
for trips and offline). That's what gave us more usage, more income and
finally it was one of the reasons of our exit.

So, yes. Trip planning sucks as a business. But all our team remembers it
proudly. It was just fucking amazing :)

~~~
rodh257
Ah man, I've been working on [http://sploria.com/](http://sploria.com/) for a
while, leading up to launching an MVP soon and hadn't heard of TourstEye. Had
a look at the app and the 'experiences' part is almost exactly what we've been
building, damn :(

Congrats on your success with the product though, it's really beautiful!

------
qq66
The problem with travel planning isn't frequency of use: as other people have
pointed out, Zillow and Cars.com are used infrequently but make money.

The problem is generating a consumer willingness to pay. Kayak has a
commission on every sale, so their business model is baked in. But a travel
planning site will need to get customers to pay extra, in some way, and
they're reluctant to do so.

Travel planning is something that people have never paid for directly --
travel agents used to extract their fees invisibly -- so a travel planning
company will either need to sell the travel themselves and collect commission
like existing travel sites, or create a new market.

~~~
briandear
Zillow being used infrequently is an assumption. Real estate investors (and
those that would like to be) use Zillow almost constantly because it offers
some seriously helpful data that is vital to helping with good investment
decisions -- and with real estate, you can never have enough data. I'm on
Zillow multiple times per day. I also travel enough that I am Platinum in
United, yet I have never used a travel planning site, nor do I actively look
for one when getting ready for another trip. I use Trip Advisor for my
preliminary hotel hunt, for restaurants. For attracticions, Trip Advisor works
but so does a normal Google search. Travel Planning isn't 'painful' to me; at
least not enough to use travel planning software. I just don't get the value
or the problem it purports to solve. I do however, generally love TripIt Pro
because there's nothing worse than looking for a confirmation number among
multiple days worth of emails while standing at some counter or another.
TripIt solves the very real problem of disorganized travel information. Before
I used TripIt, I would have to hand-enter the ibro into my phone's Calender.
But a travel-planning site? It would have to be really compelling to get me to
invest the time to join yet another service. For 'challenging' destinations
like India, it could be very valuable, but only if the quality of the
information was better than I can find on my own through Google. There'd need
to be more than just a bunch of third party APIs, there's need to be some
original content. Trip Planning software is a hard sell because I don't find a
week long trip to St Tropez or Austin that hard to plan.

~~~
squiggy22
Concur on that assumption. Real estate sites in general have a huge amount of
passive traffic that can generate advertising revenue. Women in particular
have a huge affinity to just browsing listings for fun and aspirational
purposes. Whilst Zillow isn't ad driven, know a fair number of sites that rely
on that. Source. Work in the space.

~~~
judk
Zillow makes most of its money from ads for real estate agents.

------
AndrewKemendo
_How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult,
probably once or twice a year if you 're lucky._

This is exactly why this doesn't work. There are tons of things that people do
that need fixing, but they do them so rarely that the costs of adopting the
new way of doing it are significant when compared to the cost of just doing it
the old way.

Said another way, very few people are going to take an hour to learn a new
process which would otherwise only take two hours a year to do.

edit: This also is a way that a start-up could go super wrong and not know it
until they try to scale. Identified pain point, good solution, engaged users
with a real problem use it once and then it drops off completely. Talk about
frustrating!

~~~
sourc3
About 1.5 years ago, we were going through possible itches we could scratch
with a bunch of friends and how to turn them into a fun startup. The very
first thing that came to mind was a travel planning app.

After going through different rounds of evaluating the idea, we came up with
the same conclusion that a service/app with 2-3 uses in a year is not a viable
app to make money off of.

We followed the first anti-pattern of startup ideas and immediately started
thinking about making it a platform (when in doubt abstract away). When we
realized that we were pushing too hard to make a fun project a financially
viable startup idea, we gave up and eventually moved onto different ideas.

It's a pity that such a commonplace problem is such an unattractive business
model at least with the current approaches that come to mind..

------
ismaelc
Business travel might be an exception. Especially for companies who have to
manage travel for their employees, and business travelers who want utility
features that increase their productivity. Some ideas:

\- Incentivize employees who share rides from/to hotel/airport traveling on
same dates/destinations

\- Show dates for destination that maximizes networking opportunities (in
between conferences)

\- Show locations with wifi in-between meetings

\- Locations with ambiance ideal for business discussions

\- Expense capture to identify opportunities for deals (employees love
Starbucks during business trips, sign up for corporate deals)

For those solving these sorts of problems, you might wanna to check this out -
[https://developer.concur.com/devcon/PerfectTripFundAwards](https://developer.concur.com/devcon/PerfectTripFundAwards)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
This was my first thought, every big corporate I have worked for had at least
one person or sometimes a whole department managing employee travel.

------
randomsearch
Please can someone answer the following question, in all seriousness:

What problem is the travel planning software startup solving?

Never have I planned a holiday and thought "I need an app for this." Maybe a
better flight booking system, or a better guidebook, but never a website or
app. In fact, I find planning holidays enjoyable and fairly straightforward.

I know of no-one who has difficulty planning their holiday, beyond the flight
problem. And to make this work, you're going to need a lot of people with the
same problem, whatever that problem is.

Anyone?

~~~
silverlake
I have this problem every year. Last year I went on a 6 week vacation. I
wanted to go to an African safari, but where? What should I see? What route is
best? Turns out safaris are super-expensive and I can only afford 2 weeks.
What should I do for the rest of the time? My flight had a stop-over in
Turkey, so I might as well spend a few weeks there. Should I also go to
Greece, Croatia, or southern Italy? It was October so I only want to go where
the weather is still warm. I wanted to stay in interesting B&Bs, go hiking in
Crete, see gorillas in Uganda, etc.

I ended up going through a human travel agent who planned a wonderful trip at
a steep discount to the luxury safari pre-planned trips because she understood
what we wanted to pay for (experiences) and what we didn't care about (fancy
hotels).

~~~
randomsearch
Thanks for the interesting example.

Couple of questions:

Not many people go on six week vacations, right? If you were planning a two
week holiday, would you still be faced with so many decisions and complexity?
If not, the market you represent would be limited to longer holidays, which
may be a very small market.

Second, could an app provide you with a better service than your travel agent?
i.e. is this a "problem", or is a "solved problem" because a satisfactory
solution exists already?

~~~
silverlake
I usually take 2 to 3 week vacations, but I try to do interesting things. Ride
horses around mongolia. Hike volcanos in Indonesia. Bike and eat across
France. Planning is a huge pain because we have to learn everything before we
can make the right choices. A travel agent already knows the domain. I do
think there could be tools to help agents arrange trips more quickly given our
unique constraints. Sadly, there is no app for that. Regardless, the market is
likely a small niche.

------
ghaff
If only we had some combination of software and people with expertise in
destinations. Maybe we'd call it a travel agent or something like that.

That was snarky. But it points to the historical problem here. Most travel
agents didn't/don't have a lot of expertise outside of fairly narrow domains.
And they mostly depended on commissions from pretty routine stuff to subsidize
labor-intensive planning for oddball itineraries--which I'm guessing can't be
easily codified in software.

In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of competent travel planners but they cost
money--i.e. are luxury goods--and most people don't want to pay the money.

~~~
merrua
Do people still use travel agents? The only time I used one (trip was a gift)
we had a bad experience. I think pretty much all the younger generation/tech
savy people plan their own trips online manually.

~~~
wastedhours
A good travel agent makes things so much smoother. Large chains get economies
of scale so you don't pay much more than online/manually, but having all the
bits and bobs sorted (courtesy calls if anything changes, transfers, etc.)

------
waterside81
The opportunity in travel these days is targeting people new to travel. Forget
North America. Target young Chinese travellers who are just now beginning to
learn there's a way to travel without staying in hotels and doing bus tours
from highlight to highlight. Or wealthy Russians. You have to go really niche
if you want to make money.

25 years ago when companies like G Adventures, Intrepid etc. started, nobody
knew about small group travel, mingling with locals etc. Now that's all the
rage for westerners. Bring that idea to markets that are new travel and you've
got some opportunity.

~~~
lewi
My thoughts exactly. As other economies rise so will their thirst for travel.

------
bartkappenburg
We started [http://www.voyando.com](http://www.voyando.com) in March this
year. It's basically a crowd sourced travel advice platform (a travel planning
site in a sense). You're paying others to hash out your plans with your
specifics (hours of travel, accommodation, proximity of restaurants, etc etc).

We are guaranteeing 3 good proposals for your trip and the best will receive
the specified reward (anything from 5-100 dollars).

The struggle we are facing is that we are unable to get a decent amount of
traffic because of the really big competitors with deep pockets to acquire
this traffic. We're not in the same 'idea space' but we are still in the
travel segment. This makes it incredibly hard to compete.

Despite good press, really good customer satisfaction and a business model,
the site is struggling. We are now looking to partner up with one of the big
brands to 'catch' drop offs from their main site with a service that can
retain the customer. Maybe I'm being to optimistic that any big brand will
take this chance, but I'm confident that our platform does it job and that it
can be a tool to get your drop off rate down ("Didn't find what you were
looking for? Let our experts help!)

If anyone can hook me up with the right people to pursue this, I would be very
grateful :-).

------
natural219
This is a great observation! I'm two months into this "digital nomad"
experiment, and the biggest pain has been lack of central organization for my
schedule, todos, costs, sights-to-see, etc.

My interpretation is that the domain is simply too big, and the field of
"personas" so varied that finding a critical mass of core users around common
use cases is nigh impossible. Even within those identifying as "digital
nomads", you have adventure tourists, travel-blog content marketers, $100/hr
front-end consultants, cultural commentators, resilience quacks, and so on.

Look at a site like TripAdvisor, which does a great job of aggregating the
_most basic_ reviews of restaurants, hotels, etc., and even it contends with
enormous problems like data rot, internalization, etc.

I suspect that, if the "long-term travel" community continues to grow, there
will emerge specific niches that could reach that critical mass needed for an
MVP of a serious travel planning app. For now, trying to parse through google
results for "apps for digital nomads" is something like a nightmarish goose
chase through an illegible jungle of travel blog shills.

~~~
walterbell
What's a "resilience quack"?

~~~
malcote
Seriously. Inquiring minds want to know.

------
overgard
Sounds clever, but it really doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are countless
profitable businesses that aren't things you use daily (Amazon, E-Bay, AirBnB,
etc etc.) Conversely, how many sites do you really visit daily? I visit, like,
four. (Gmail, reddit, facebook, hacker news)

Travel planning software is difficult because there's so much competition and
a lot of political forces trying to keep the newcomers out.

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
Eh, Amazon gets used a few times a month by a whole lot of people. Ebay
definitely has addicts. AirBnB fits your theory better, but I think they
managed to get noticed by being truly disruptive.

When you first hear about a travel planning site, it probably doesn't just
happen to coincide with a time you're planning to travel, so best-case
scenario is you bookmark it, which just goes into a giant list of bookmarks
that you'll never look at again.

And when you need to plan a trip, you'll just go to expedia or hotwire or some
other site that's gotten burned in your brain through advertising. Or you'll
just google flights. Because that's the simplest thing to do and it comes up
with pretty decent prices.

~~~
kristiandupont
>I think they managed to get noticed by being truly disruptive.

A company is not "truly disruptive" before it's disrupting something. I'll bet
there are thousands of apps and services out there that have ideas that could
potentially become disruptive if they gained traction. Many, maybe most of
these will never go anywhere.

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
I bet you're right. Luck plays a huge, huge factor. And knowing the right
people.

------
lazyjones
Everyone seems to have a different understanding of what a "travel planner" is
/ should do. I was thinking of rome2rio when I read this headline (which is
very nice and doing great apparently), but from the comments here I gather
many people want to solve the "social" (i.e. what to see etc.) aspect rather
than the pure technical one (how to get there, how to save money) of it.

Considering how much money goes into travel (and related mergers/acquisitions
- these are real acquisitions and not inflated valuations from 7-8 figure
investments), it's definitely not a bad idea though.

~~~
kamjam
I discovered [http://www.rome2rio.com](http://www.rome2rio.com) a few months
back and it's a fantastic site. This is what I was expecting too, it will give
me all travel options from point A to B, Google Maps but international/cross
border. Maybe something changed on that Yahoo Travel planner, the original
article was posted over 2 years ago.

------
danso
Kind of surprised that the OP hadn't mentioned Hopper, the travel startup that
was founded in 2007, promised to bring "big data" to travel discovery, and
still hasn't much to show for $22M in venture funding:
[http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/20/why-travel-startup-
hopper-f...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/20/why-travel-startup-hopper-
founded-in-2007-took-so-long-to-launch/)

But I agree with the OP. Travel planning is a rare luxury, even for the rich.
And I don't know what it's like to be rich, but when I find time to travel, I
put a loose itinerary together and then improvise most of the way, with
occasional lookups on TripAdvisor. There's not really a travel service that
can meet the needs of wanderlust.

------
bennyg
AirBnB is a solid exception to the "must be daily users - 20% retention"
statistic. No way is their average user base a daily user.

~~~
joncalhoun
There are two unique userbases for AirBnB - renters and renters. Renters may
not have a 20% daily retention but I would bet that rentees are much closer to
20%.

On top of that, AirBnB is a marketplace. I would imagine that marketplaces are
affected more by supply and demand ownership than daily retention.

~~~
frankdenbow
I was going to propose the exact opposite: renters who want to keep their
ratings high go back frequently to answer inquiries while each individual
rentee only goes on the site occasionally when traveling.

~~~
joncalhoun
I chose not to use "owner" because not all people listing on AirBnB own their
property, but I think we were thinking the same thing. People listing
properties almost definitely have higher retention than travelers.

------
11thEarlOfMar
It's a bit different when it comes to business travel. I'd use and pay for
travel planning for business where my schedule can take me to out of the way
places and the schedule can change frequently. There is a tier of business
traveler in small businesses or who are self employed and need an economical
itinerary with specific attributes for flights and hotels, but who don't want
to stay in crappy places. I've spent far more time on HipMunk and on the phone
with hotels.com and re-booking flights than I should have to. Maybe start a
manual service, learn how this stuff works and then automate it.

~~~
eddmc
Or you could start using a good travel agent, as they would do these things
for you.

Is this a good time investment for you? You have a choice on what you spend
your time on. You could install your own plumbing, write your own t's and c's
etc. or you could pay someone to do it.

------
alexweberk
Having thought about this idea in the past, I can say that one of the
difficulty lies in the fact that the market "seems" really large, when in
fact, you can only address a limited portion of it. People have different
tastes and goals in what they want to accomplish in a "trip", and because the
market seems so vast and large, the idea tends to gravitate towards the middle
ground. You might satisfy a wide array of people, but none of them will really
"love" your product. So rather than daily usage, I think the problem is of
segmentation first (and competition, etc following...).

------
FollowSteph3
I think the issue is revenue and not user forgetting about the website. People
remember sites years later. The problem is the business model. People are not
willing to pay for the services of a travel planner which is expensive to
build, which means your revenues are affiliate or ad based. This is not enough
to support the dev costs.

I've just read many comments that show getting traffic is not an issue. Yes it
might be more competitive but lots have gotten traffic. The common issue I see
is that none of them have been able to generate enough revenues to support
themselves, even with good traffic.

~~~
ghaff
Bingo. A travel planner is pretty much a solved problem. It's called a savvy,
experienced travel agent who gives personalized service. The problem, as you
say, is that most people aren't willing to pay for that type of service. And
it's unclear to what degree software can solve the time-consuming stuff--such
as places that aren't online or at least require emailing back and forth or
phone calls (as is still the case even in the US with a lot of B&Bs for
example). Which is the problem people are looking to solve, given that air
reservations and the like are easily handled by existing sites (except when
they aren't:-)).

------
ronilan
No daily usage, not enough trips and also it is impossible to build a multi-
billion corporation out of an SEO play. Too bad TripAdvisor won't work. /S

------
amerkhalid
I think a lot of travel sites focus on saving money for travellers. What if
money is not that important.

My friend came up with this idea. I think it will help many people. The idea
is that one put in how much they want to spend and how much time they have.
The site will show various travel or activity options that are possible. One
can further limit by parameters such as road trip only, out of state
destinations, in town activities, etc. Almost like travel agents.

I have been looking for something similar but haven't found it. My friend is a
great traveller and he and his wife have run out of places to visit. They just
want to explore new places.

On other hand, my wife & I are not so great travellers, we never know where to
go. We end up picking top destinations from TripAdvisor, then we find those a
bit too expensive or require too much travel time, etc. Sometimes we just want
to get out of town and not worry about where we are going.

For now, I have solved this problem for us by creating a spreadsheet, with a
list of places we had picked and estimate cost, best travel time, and ideal #
of days to spend there. But of course, this is for places we researched and
could not afford at the time.

------
xorcist
This article rings very true, but on the other hand I've thoguht the same
thing about a dozen other things that seemed dead until someone came along and
did what seemed impossible.

When Myspace was neglected and Livejournal stagnant, a lot of small actors
tried to fill the void but there was absolutely no money to be made and I
predited them all dead within two years. I was _almost_ completely right.

------
joyeuse6701
Figure I'd add my own two cents to building software for this: School project
with a few buddies, decided to make an itinerary planner. Problem was that it
was messy and difficult to plan a trip with 3+ people. Emailing back and forth
gave you long chains, calls and group chats were difficult to schedule
together and settle on something. Ultimately a Google spreadsheet or shared
doc was the best option despite limitations. Enter the itinerary planner: Post
possible destinations, majority vote by a certain time to include or exclude
in plan. It was to act as a central place to plan pre-trip, view during trip,
and post after trip(web app or native app).

Eventually, the realization was the same problem as most people have
mentioned, retention. So then comes the weekend planner. Miniature trips or
adventures for weekends or long weekends are much more common, spontaneous and
way easier to make decisions. Google Now already offers suggestions of events
and places to be during the weekend based off Geo and whatnot, just have to
take it a step further.

------
krammer
I had a travel planning startup for 5 years and I agree 100% with Tan's about
that you have to re-acquire the user every 9 months and the main reason is
that the user is unable to remember your "name". But imho the main problem on
travel industry if you are doing a travel planner is not exactly that the user
doesn't remember you... this happens at other industries: job finders, real
state, consumer electronics...

The big problem in travel is competence. It makes user (re) acquisition REALLY
expensive and probably, as a startup, you can't afford it (an this mixed with
no actual retention is painful). And why is it so expensive: because you cant
compete with advertising, SEM or even SEO with big players out there with a
LTV that multiplies yours by 10x. And actually, do a better job than you when
we are talking about user satisfaction.

Airlines, big online travel agencies are really good at this and pay for a)
Long tail SEM, b) content for being top SEO. Remember, Online Travel Agencies
are technology companies with big resources. They are extremely good at SEO,
at loyalty, at landing page optimization, at design, at customer service...
their life is on it.

Think about this scenario:

User searches at google for "traveling to Vienna" (or even "travel planning
vienna"). You know two things about that user: 1) He wants to plan his trip to
Vienna (75% true) 2) He is going to buy cheap tickets to Vienna (95% true).

Big OTAs or Airlines know this, and what they do? They fake they are travel
planners doing better (expensive) SEO than you as they know that user is going
to buy the ticket at their site (that's 2$ per visit revenue)... because they
do that extremely good. If they fail noone cares: User wont remember and at
least they had brand awareness for their plane tickets.

Anyway, i think the problem is much simpler and applies at every industry: if
you don't have a great retention (and this can be something not under your
control, e.g. because what you are selling is needed twice a year) you have to
be really good at user acquisition. And being good at user acquisition at a
not-niche sector is extremely hard, no matter how good your product is.
Probably you will have to focus first on what's your hack on getting users
instead of at having a good product. Sad but true.

I've been reviewing Alexa's top travel sites for years hoping something
changes... and its pretty discouraging: only 1 of top 25 sites not a ticket-
seller: Tripadvisor (2nd). 4 in top 50, and all of them are super seo sites.

Google has been punishing not content sites for years, even being the best
solutions. We've seen a lot of amazing ajax tools for almost every problem we
could figure out... but if they were not seo compatible, everyone forgets
them. I hope this changes in the future, e.g. mobile apps have another search
scenario.

~~~
nicholassmith
I think if you could own the pre-trip organisation, and the post-trip sharing
that would help cement it in the users mind. Most people dump the photos onto
Facebook, but I imagine if there was a way to organise the data nicely or
build a basic travelog from the trip data some people would be interested.

Interesting about the only non-ticket seller being Tripadvisor, I didn't
realise it was that skewed toward trips sales.

~~~
aragot
> pre-trip organisation

Here, that's a reason for having very low trust for travel planers. They want
to bring you sideways. You're the product.

~~~
stevesearer
I've arrived at this conclusion in my mind regarding trip sharing or trip
rating services - though for slightly different reasons.

Once someone creates a self-hosted, WordPress-like, trip sharing software, I'd
be all over it. Like my blog, I'd like to know that my time spent writing and
uploading photos is going to last longer than the typical lifespan of a
startup.

~~~
Essa
Not wordpress, but currently building a digital travel journal in which you
can share trips like this
[https://esplor.io/trips/k8g96my2j4vnm](https://esplor.io/trips/k8g96my2j4vnm)
(press see timeline for the diary view)

Based on what you said, you seem like the user we would target. Any feedback
would be brilliant!

------
porusdaruvala
Frequency of need is a non-issue in the travel space or any other. As has been
pointed out, there are many other spaces where lack of frequent visits has not
been a barrier to success. Nor is name recall/retention an issue - if you
create a great first impression i.e. delight your customer the first time and
give them something they really like, they are unlikely to ever forget you.

IMO, the key issues to cracking this space (and these are beyond building a
great product that people will find useful which is crazy hard anyway!):

1\. Getting new users from free channels/biz dev 2\. Getting new users from
free channels/biz dev 3\. Getting new users from free channels/biz dev

Most startups look at user acquisition as a secondary consideration to the
product. In the travel space, it has to be atleast an equal priority, if not
an even higher one. You HAVE TO figure out how to hack user acquisition from
free (or very cost effective) channels or you will fail. The sooner you start
thinking about that the better.

4\. Making money. If you can acquire millions of users, this becomes
significantly easier.

5\. Breadth/size of the space. This is a huge space with tons of variables and
different personas. You have to figure out a way to make this work to your
advantage. For example, most travel startups, being based in the US, seem to
think that users only exist in the US. There are millions of users, especially
in fast growing developing countries, who are pretty much being ignored.
Another example - if you can figure out how to service the whole space well
(and I know thats a BIG if), then at any given time you are going to be
catering to some kind of user (increasing your likelihood of reaching
millions) unlike a niche service that requires to scale based on a very
specific user persona

If you can keep acquiring new users cost effectively and delighting them with
your product, you will succeed in the travel space. Most startups cant do this
and thats why they fail. they dont fail because of the frequency of need or
name recall.

------
arrty88
As someone who is working on this idea currently, this post has really got me
down.

~~~
timmclean
Time to prove him wrong! :)

~~~
garry
I would very much like to be wrong on this one.

------
jister
Why not target travel agencies instead? Agencies can create/manage
itineraries, hotel reservation & bookings, destination maps, etc? This will
get you paying customers and daily users.

------
nnain
I have two primary concerns when booking a travel, one that I don't end up at
a boring place and two that I can manage it in the most economical way. Google
search helps me figure that out pretty well. Google Maps are great when I'm
actuall at that location. TripAdvisor has nice information. Airticket listing
sites are a necessity. AirBnb works well for places to stay. Lot of hostel
booking sites in Europe work well. But I haven't found one single tool that
can handle all that exhaustively.

Way too many travel planning softwares try aggregating resources from across
the internet, just posting it in varied forms. But they don't really give me
the confidence that it's the cheapest and the best place I can be at.
Moreover, when you look carefully at them, they skimp the details -- the
prices and timings are usually way off. To top, if they try to put a fees on
top of the original price, it adds to the cost without actually providing any
ease. So I still have to resort to going to the original source of the content
or just doing my own research. Also, many of the travel planning softwares
overlook the fact that motivating people to go for a new trip is a huge
challenge. It's also interesting to note that the blogpost was written over 2
years ago and is still true.

~~~
jmspring
"cheapest and the best place I can be at" \-- that phrase is entirely too
subjective to be able to actually easily solve. I know for myself, say on the
Big Island of Hawaii (a place I know pretty well), "best place" can
incorporate temporal concerns, desire for beaches or mountains/hiking, maybe a
place with a kitchen vs. sustaining one's self on market goods and
restaurants. Those three variables could describe at least four different
places on the island in my own mind. How does that get mapped to a general
site?

~~~
nnain
Exactly! Every person has his own concerns about planning a trip and the
problem is too subjective. That's why I said, I have to resort to my own
research to figure out the place, instead of depending on a travel planning
app. Travelogues and ratings posted on blogs and TripAdvisor give me a better
idea of what to do, compared to a list of things generated by an App.

~~~
jmspring
A question I'd love to have answered - I want a flight that is within min/max
miles and costs less than a certain point intersected with a certain class of
lodging within a certain price range. Available "amenities" of the location a
gravy filter.

------
daamsie
Creating travel planning software may well be a bad idea, but I find the
reason he gives is really weak. It boils down to:

People in America don't plan travel often enough.

If that was the reason, then almost any travel startup is non-worthy. This is
definitely a problem, but it's more to do with the difficulty of ranking a
travel planning site in Google which is where people who don't travel often
usually begin their planning. This is why SEO is so critical to any travel
website.

It also conveniently ignores the rest of the world as a market. People outside
the US do in fact travel far more often and more elaborately and ignoring them
in the equation just boggles my mind.

Disclosure: I'm also one of these people who acted on this bad idea of
creating a travel planner:
[http://www.travellerspoint.com/planner/](http://www.travellerspoint.com/planner/)

My experience from this is that people do have very different expectations of
how a travel planning tool should work. So the earlier comment that it faces
the same challenges as to-do apps, etc.. rings very true to me.

------
andyv88
The biggest problem I have had with travel planning startups is that many of
them focus too much and too quickly on monetisation - often leading to a poor
user experience.

When I'm travel planning, I like to somewhat explore the destination (like
reading a guide book) and think about what to do, where to stay etc -- rather
than being immediately shown a list of hotels & airfares.

~~~
erikstarck
Have a look at [http://owegoo.com](http://owegoo.com) I talked to the founder
yesterday. Basically they are a search engine for destinations. Good if you
know what to do but not where to go.

~~~
sofiafranzen
Yeah, we launched [http://owegoo.com](http://owegoo.com) just a few months
ago, trying to solve a few of these problems. Please hit me with feedback -
here or at sofia@owegoo.com!

------
austinhutch
I'm aware of one such startup
([https://roadtrippers.com/](https://roadtrippers.com/)) that has $4 mil in
funding[0]. Ideas don't work until they do, I think this nut can be cracked.

[0][http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/roadtrippers](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/roadtrippers)

------
cbovis
The big problem I see is that planning does in a lot of ways remove the
essence of travelling (see The Art Of Travel by Alain De Botton). The best
trips I've been on have been largely unplanned and taken on a day to day basis
which flies in the face of a single up front plan which is built once and
referred to throughout the trip.

What I do see a market for are the tools which sit in the middle and enhance
your ability to plan once your in a location. Tools like:

\- flight management \- hotel booking management \- local knowledge resources
\- tools for connecting with locals \- language tools

A lot of these are already available in various forms through dedicated
applications. I use kayak, hostel bookers, app in the air, wiki travel plus
local subway and language apps. Whether there could be an advantage to it all
being in one place I'm not sure but the tools on their own seem to do pretty
well once you've put together your toolset.

------
callmeed
People don't buy cars or get married very often either, but there are plenty
of tools to help with those processes.

------
jfc
I've been working on a travel activities startup in stealth mode, but had to
put it on hold because of other work.

Reading this article made me think back to some of the challenges I had
initially with customer development. People were always interested in the
idea, but everyone seemed to want to use it differently. It was a real
challenge to come up with something that would be useful and satisfying for
most customers.

Along the way, some people tried to talk me out of it, saying that the app
should be more like location exploration, because people don't travel alot. My
response was that while everyone doesn't travel often, there is always someone
who is planning a trip. I don't think the frequency of travel is the issue--
it's the logistics of it.

Enough of waxing nostalgic, I think I'll get my packages and libraries up-to-
date and get back moving on my idea.

------
tim333
I can see why travel planning startups fail but I don't think its for the
reason implied that people don't want the service. I travel a lot and I always
plan (to an extent) on line but I go to the best sites for the aspect required
eg. for flights Skyscanner or Kayak, for accom booking.com or laterooms or
hostelworld or airbnb. For what to see Tripadvisor. If I want combined hotel
and flight, Expedia. For local bus times etc. Google Maps. They are mostly
great services from billion dollar companies that have put in a lot of R&D.
Why should I go to a new combined travel site trying to combine stuff in a
half arsed way? To appeal to users it has to better than the existing
solutions already available.

------
deathflute
I have a travel startup that is meant to solve the planning problem in a
different way, but I agree with Gary. We painfully learned that -

a) We created an elegant solution to free. That is always a bad idea

b) User acquisition is extremely hard without spending tons of money

c) Even though the users love the product, the fact that they would only use
it couple of times a year means that you need to have lots of users, which
circles back to the previous point

It sucks because the travel space really needs quality apps and I would like
to believe that there is a way around all the issues for startups. But the
fact remains that it is a bad idea for most people.

------
vkasera
In the smartphone world you don't need to remember to use the service. Service
can use well targeted contextual notifications to remind you when it is
relevant. Obscurity is much less of an issue for intelligent services (even if
they are rarely used).

I believe that there is probably an opportunity to build these services that
have never worked in the desktop world but can work in the mobile world.

Travel planning has other problems (e.g. all the money is in bookings and not
itinerary creation). Hotel bookings are super profitable - and hence expedia
can spend > $1B per annum on adwords to re-acquire customers.

------
netcan
These are all real and serious challenges. LTV of an average user is a tricky
one because it can involve 19 "users" worth $0 an 1 worth $500, but the price
of an adwords click or whatnot will be set based on the $25 average value.
But, you might have something for the other 19 "users" that doesn't bring the
average value up to that scale. It's a legitimate difficulty.

The acquisition/reacquisition and learning to use some specific software
paradigm is a legit difficulty. Something that works for a hotel concierge
using it daily may not work for an occasional traveler.

Real problems.

OTOH, I think that ultimately "travel planning" or something to that effect is
not impossible, just difficult. Review sites like Yelp are great for finding
something that is popular but not terrible on average, but I have gotten far
more mileage out of guide books where the author seemed to have tastes that I
enjoyed. Usually I don't have one, but.. There is still a ways to go.

It would be facetious to seriously suggest some solution because obviously
these things need to be banged out in the real world, but I can imagine all
sorts of things that _might work_. How about you enter the location of your
accommodation, tick a few boxes for your budget and travel modes (walking,
taxis) and it spits out a decent guidebook chapter. Local walking maps,
restaurants, bars, local gigs for this evening. Some explanations about local
tipping norms, buying train tickets and maybe a one page phrasebook. Give me
an app where I can push a button to do this from a Cafe's wifi and I'll at
least give it a try. If I can print it out, I might.

Maybe a person could be in charge of a city or part of one. Maybe not. I
dunno. The idea that good ideas and execution can't penetrate this industry
doesn't sound convincing to me. I have no doubt that its hard but I also
wouldn't be surprised to see startups take off that really nail informational
based stuff for travelers.

One upside that the commercial realities of this industry can offers is a
multitude of opportunities to make money from having a userbase . IE, if you
have 1,000 active users in a city on any given day, that's enough to make
something.

In fact, I think it's something that's accessible for people to have a go at.
Even authoring a local guidebook for your city (provided it is not New York or
somesuch, in this case, pick an area). Keep sections up to date with weekly
info and release it as an evoke, app or whatever.

Information is still what the traveller needs, IMO.

------
SomeCallMeTim
I had to laugh when I saw this headline.

I'm planning a road trip. And I have been actively searching for a "road trip
planner" site.

Whatever Yahoo had at the link he mentioned apparently is gone; it just goes
to the Yahoo Travel page.

And everything else I found was complete garbage. "Wrap a Google Maps
Directions page with something to put pins in the map near the route for
certain categories of attractions" is as far as any of them went.

I don't know what Yahoo's "Trip Planner" was about, but given the overall lack
of ANYTHING like a decent road trip planner available, I'd have to guess that
it also sucked. Otherwise some of the competing sites would have stolen at
least SOME of the obvious features.

What was missing, you ask?

1\. Some way to tally up a list of interesting sites. Showing me sites along a
route is only about 20% of the way to being interesting; before these sites I
could Google cities on the way to find destinations to visit. Actually
providing more value than Google already provides is critical.

2\. A way to print out area maps and contact details for each of the
interesting sites.

3\. A way to sort the sites and travel details by day (I'm planning a multi-
day road trip).

This is for the _MVP_ , and shouldn't take a competent developer more than a
week working with Google APIs or equivalent. A _good_ developer should be able
to crank this out in a day or two. I'm tempted just so I can use the
functionality to plan my trip!

I have to assume that the dozen or more sites that I looked at were made by
people thinking "I'll make a road trip planner!", but who had never taken a
road trip. Or who were copy-and-paste developers who could figure out just
enough of the APIs to get a basic Google Directions view going, but more
complexity was beyond them.

Bonus features (post MVP):

* List the cities at both ends of the road trip and the KINDS of places you might like to visit, and suggest various route options along with the unique stops you could make on the way.

* After you list the places you want to go and how many hours you want to spend at each, plan the driving stops and an optimized order of visiting the destinations. "Day 3: Get up, go to X restaurant near your hotel, drive 2 hours to Y museum, lunch at Z restaurant, then spend 3 hours at the museum across the street..."

* Include AirBNB locations on the map in addition to hotels, but ONLY show both near the end of a day's drive (corollary: give it a range of how many hours you want to be driving per day).

* Let me put in preference categories of food, and after planning a route, look for restaurants near where we'll be at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Double-plus bonus: Only recommend restaurants that are _open_ at the time I'll be there. (Yes, Google does have a first approximation of this information, though it's often spotty.)

* Let me (easily!) blacklist specific businesses or chains. I hate calling up a map with that shows 15 restaurants in an area, and where I would only ever go to 2 of them, and having to click on all the dots until I find the right ones. Google Maps needs this feature!

* Let me filter attractions that get terrible reviews, so they don't clutter up my map -- and pull in reviews from Google AND TripAdvisor (assuming they let you?) and other sites. In some small towns, you might have one review on Google and one more on TripAdvisor -- if there are a ton on both it doesn't matter, but if there are only a few, even one more can be relevant.

Is this a good business plan? Heck if I know. I only know that I _really_ want
a site that does all of this right now (or at least points 1-3). And I sure-
as-heck _would_ remember a site like that and find it again when I took my
next road trip. Bookmarks are magic ways to supplement your memory. No idea
how many people still do road trips, though. Maybe more would if they had the
right tools, and knew what awesome places can be found in the middle of
nowhere, then it would be more popular?

~~~
skrebbel
> _This is for the MVP, and shouldn 't take a competent developer more than a
> week working with Google APIs or equivalent. A good developer should be able
> to crank this out in a day or two. I'm tempted just so I can use the
> functionality to plan my trip!_

I assume you're not a developer?

~~~
hrvbr
Yeah he wants a geographical recommendation system with tons of data that
likely don't even exist online like restaurant menus, and have that quickly
hacked in a week.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I'm not looking for anything that isn't online already. I would be happy with
JUST the results available in Google Maps, in fact.

I'm not asking for restaurant menus; the restaurants ARE categorized in Google
Maps already.

I know _exactly_ what data is available, and how I'd code it. I just don't
have the time.

------
ojbyrne
Tripit looks to have had a reasonable exit before this article was written:

[http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tripit](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tripit)

[http://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/0551c63d066e0afe86046a...](http://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/0551c63d066e0afe86046a40878ebbeb)

~~~
briandear
TripIt isn't a planning site, it's more of an organizational tool.

~~~
krigi
Correct. Once you're done planning your trip, you can send it to TripIt (or
give TripIt OAuth access to your email) and it'll be organized in your
account. There is no planning.

------
cwiz
Something clicked in me when I read the title & article: this is all true. I
made one travel planner few years ago and decided to open source it some time
later, when it become apparent that it's really hard to get decent traction
with it: [https://github.com/cwiz/GoFree](https://github.com/cwiz/GoFree)

------
akrymski
I'm not sure it's a matter of frequency, but rather a matter of value that the
service ultimately provides.

Biggest concern with Google's business model initially was that they are "just
a search engine" meaning they don't get as many page-views as portals. However
Google managed to make more money than portals because ultimately they
provided more value to the adviser (less impressions, but more targeted). At
the end of the day, Google's service was intrinsically valuable - if they
charged an annual fee to access the search engine, lots of people would pay
up. The business model extracted that value, albeit in a different fashion.

You can't monetise trip planning with advertising indeed because there aren't
enough users to make that model work. But if it's a valuable service - you
should be able to charge a small fee for it. "We'll help you plan your trip
for $10. Or $20 if you want us to put in some human effort". Given that it
takes X hours to plan a trip, and a user's average wage is $Y per hour, some
number should make sense. And of course the service would generate leads and
other commissions.

Would anyone pay $10 for a service that planned a trip for them? I'm afraid
not many people would, which means it's just not as valuable as people believe
it is.

Up-market travel agencies plan trips for wealthy clients for free - there's
plenty of commissions to go around - so that model works. Trip planning
"software" however doesn't seem to provide enough value in its current form,
but that doesn't mean it isn't feasible. If someone booked my flights, hotels,
restaurants, tours, sight-seeing, theatres etc for a 2-week journey for me,
they'd probably have a decent revenue stream from commissions alone (hotels
pay 15%). Hell, I know a guy that plans trips for high-net-worth individuals
and takes 10% of everything they spend.

I think the problem is that too many startups are afraid of the human element
involved - having people make recommendations doesn't scale - they say.
However a semi-automated approach, that gave you a real PA / concierge service
throughout your trip would actually provide sufficient value imo. I know many
wealthy people that would pay significant sums to have the whole thing planned
(and booked!) for them in advance. Monopolise the up-market niche of VIP
travel planning, before going mass market and you have a shot at a profitable
business.

------
andy_ppp
Well, I actually worked on Yahoo! Trip Planner (making it internationalised).
There was zero engagement indeed, but everyone knew it was a crap idea then,
at least in Europe. No idea how trip planner recruited ANYONE!

Yahoo is good at one thing slapping ads on content and making loads of money
from it. Everything else they need to stop doing.

------
gambiting
"In fact, Americans are notorious for shirking vacation, clocking the lowest
rates of vacation on the plane"

That's because America is one of the very few 1st world countries without
mandatory holiday time. 25 days of paid holidays + unlimited sick leave here
in the EU are the required minimum by law.

~~~
cpitman
Nope, sorry. That might be part of it, but Americans also are very reluctant
to take vacations even when we have plenty of time off to use. In my
experience it comes down somewhere between "things will fall apart without me"
and "this is what I do".

I'm a (regrettable) example of this. I get 22 days off a year, and maybe take
off half of that. I've usually accrued the max vacation we are allowed, so it
just goes to waste each pay period. It's ridiculous, but its not caused by
anyone but me.

~~~
gambiting
>>I've usually accrued the max vacation we are allowed, so it just goes to
waste each pay period

Sorry to be annoying about this, but in EU if you don't use your vacation time
you have to be paid for it, at full rate. So it never really goes to waste,
even if you willingly decide not to use it.

------
wellboy
The other bad idea, local travel experiences, there were hundreds of them, but
it's really hard to get critical mass, because you need to have enough
experience hosts, experiences and then also visitors. The only ones that made
it work were www.getyourguide.com who raised $14M.

~~~
nojvek
I think its the classic chicken-egg problem like any other platform.

------
hxu
Yet the travel startups keep coming. Case in point: Travel blog Skift.

However, one trend I've noticed with travel review site TripAdvisor (which has
been around for 15 years) is it's becoming a Yelp alternative. In that sense,
it gets more of the regular activity that the OP referenced.

------
hzshen
This fits perfectly with my startup food-chain theory.

In the internet startup world, there is an invisible food chain, whatever
"higher" models will eventually "eat" "lower" models.

A travel planner, with low frequency, no real pain, doesn't stand very high on
the food chain.

~~~
andreash
I'm curious about your food-chain idea. Can you explain it a little more and
give more examples?

------
njloof
I don't travel a ridiculous amount, but TripIt is great and very sticky.
Easing the pain of travel makes it worth your while. And knowing when I happen
to be in the same city as a traveling friend is invaluable.

------
alexandrabreman
I have just used Owegoo.com for hotel and flights. Creative filters, not only
A to B. Swedish startup, not perfect but a very interesting start. On
www.owegoo.com they also have a lot of city guides.

~~~
alexandrabreman
[http://www.owegoo.com](http://www.owegoo.com)

------
ilovecomputers
No one remembers Dopplr? It was a pretty popular social travel planning site
before Nokia bought them and froze it to death. It was like, one of the
original web 2.0 sites alongside Flickr.

~~~
wink
I had the feeling no one used Dopplr for vacations. Me and quite a few people
I know input their conference and business trips, so with only a bit more
traction it could have served "oh, you're also in $CITY, let's meet" quite
well.

This was in Germany and a few years ago, though. With only tech people. Not a
bad demographic, but there's probably a reason it got canned.

~~~
genmon
Dopplr went after the conference/business market, and at least in my crowd it
had critical mass. That might be because I know the founders...

But it cracked OP's issue of needing daily use so you remember the service. I
would check Dopplr to see which of my friends were coming to London -- that's
much more frequent than me travelling, to the tune of travel_frequency *
friends / cities. It was useful, and I still miss Dopplr today.

------
Mithaldu
It feels like the author likes to see his family suffer and fundamentally
misunderstands reality:

> everyone has the problem of not spending enough quality time with friends
> and family. Travel is the best and most meaningful way to do that.

Travel is an acceptable means to making it possible to achieve the end goal of
spending time with friends and family, especially when separated by great
distances. However as a means of directly spending time with one another
travel is the most time-consuming and stressful way to do that; especially
when you mix the ambiguity of squishy human sentiments with a rigid travel
schedule.

And this is probably why nobody really gives a damn to use such things.

~~~
netcan
This is a lifestyle question and these are hard to generalize. It works well
for me personally. 3-4 days someplace doing sightseeing, or maybe some outdoor
activity is an accessible way of spending a few days with someone and having
time that we wouldn't otherwise have. Many of my friends and family live in a
different country. Flights and accommodation are affordable. Time is scarce
and if we visit eachother in one of our normal lives, it's harder to find
whole days to relax hang out.

A context for spending time together is (to generalize) a pretty good way of
maintaining relationships, relaxing and having fun. You might have a friend,
parent or child with whom you occasionally go fishing, hunting, bird spotting
or whatnot. You might have an old army friend you meet every few years for
something else. You might have a cousin you meet for a run once a week.
Whatever the specifics, context for spending time together between people
works in many cases.

Travel is a good context. It's accessible, easy to arrange and works for a lot
of people you might want to catch up with.

------
lazyant
I remember the sites to search for airplane tickets like Hipmunk, Kayak or
Expedia, they have the recognition so perhaps they can add travel planning.

------
bsbechtel
Cost to find and learn learn new travel planning software > cost to plan trip
yourself with the internet

------
rodolphoarruda
After wedding planning software...

------
zbravo
How is the problem "If I don't remember it, I won't use it." solved?

------
bdcravens
Based on the comments to the article, this is a year old (still valid, just a
bit old)

------
erikb
I failed a travel planning start-up in 2007. Way before our time, I guess.

------
taurath
> Americans are notorious for shirking vacation, clocking the lowest rates of
> vacation on the planet

As if they really have a choice in the matter.

