

The state of some travel startups and why some are missing the pain point - dlitwak
http://www.tnooz.com/2013/06/05/news/the-state-of-some-travel-startups-and-why-some-are-missing-the-pain-point/

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jonnathanson
An interesting issue you raise, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that
"social discovery" isn't always the best answer to any question. For some
categories it makes a lot of sense. For plenty more categories, it's a novelty
at best, and the utility is questionable.

IMO, the best way to make travel "social" is to make _social_ travel easier,
viz., make organizing trips for groups easier. That's a legitimate problem to
solve.

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tesseract
Something that could be solved with better search would be group travel for
people originating in different cities. Call it "travel search for LDRs". I am
in city X, someone else is in city Y, what are some other cities that we can
all fly to for N overlapping days at a minimum _total_ cost?

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geverett
That was the original premise of tripcommon.com - it's pivoted a bit but you
can still use it for that exact functionality.

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PaulHoule
I think BART dominates all the other ways of getting between SF and SFO, but
when I go to conferences it seems I'm the only USian to think that way.

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dlitwak
public transit is actually a fairly small percentage of the way people get to
and from airports. SF is one of the highest in the country though, I think
around 22% of people use transit to get to and from the airport. However, on
the opposite side is Cleveland with 5%.

Regardless, there are a lot of people who may be going to a suburb and not a
hotel by the BART stop that don't want to do 3 transfers and would rather take
a shuttle. Until a multimodal search engine can show me those options, I'm not
really interested.

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avn2109
Speaking of pain points: I often have a X days and $Y00 free, and want to take
a trip somewhere overseas without particularly caring where I go (though I do
care about price). It would be incredibly convenient if there were a service
that lists all international destinations for a given departure date, sorted
by price. Approximating this manually is quite difficult.

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dlitwak
You can use SkyScanner's Everywhere search, so look from London to
"Everywhere" and you will get a list of destinations.

However, this was often the premise of these inspiration sites that didn't
work out. Wanderfly has the ability to search by number of days and how much
money you had to spend, but it didn't really work.

These things are good in concept, but it gets back to my point, that they need
TONS of data to make any meaningful recommendations, and that data doesn't
exist yet on travel. In many cases music is easier, as a former classical
musician I can attest to this, in music theory there are diminished chords,
augmented triads, all different types of existing classifications of different
types of sound.

In travel it's a big mess. You need big data solutions to sort through the
problems, and just building a pretty interface won't solve it, which is what
most of these companies have been doing.

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jpwagner
Terrific points! and all without even addressing the whole social travel
problem (that traveling involves _places_ and places are where _people_ are).

Plenty of room for innovation in this space.

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jmspring
The intersection of people interests and what places provide is an unsolved
problem. The profile that says I am into X, Y, and Z and an app that can say
what at place A or B is relevant is hard to come by. At least for me, it all
involves direct searches.

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alexsilver
That is mostly because the "degree of relevancy" is highly subjective in
travel and is never constant as places adapt new tourism strategies, new
things get built and open. Plus, if you think about it, most world's
destinations have pretty much EVERYTHING in each category of travel, if you
look hard enough. Sure, some things may receive greater focus but in the end
you can find something to your fancy pretty much anywhere you go.

To contrast this with music, where a song will always stay the same and the 3
minutes of it are, arguably, easy to deconstruct into components, classify by
genre/rhythm/artist/etc., and then index.

Disclaimer: we too are building a "trip planning tool" but I think we've found
a good angle to approach the problem with to avoid the situation most
"inspiration"/"social"/"planning" travel startups find themselves in.

