It dawned on me recently that like so many other Google apps, Wave has the potential to disrupt the crowded trip planning site arena.
If you haven’t received your coveted Google Wave invite, don’t worry, you probably will soon.
The problem is that once you receive it, it really doesn’t do much for you until you find some contacts to Wave with.
While working with Graham Robertson, a Canadian blogger who lives in Australia on an interview that we were conducting via the Wave, it occurred to me that the tool would be particularly useful if I were planning a trip with a group of people.
Here is how I imagine it would work:
I would invite a few of my travel mates to join a wave.
We would start the conversation around the destination or activities we would want to do, share some files, links to sites we find, maybe even some photos that we upload.
Sort out the details in real-time and store the entire conversation on-line. We can all go back through the conversation at any point in order to pick up stuff we’ve missed or add comments and replies as we go.
Once the decision is made, we could even upload copies of reservations or bookings directly to wave to store and share with everyone in the wave.
So, two important questions:
- Why this could be a planning site killer? Simply put, it’s impartial, it’s multi-purpose, it’s available, and it’s Google. Although the Wave is not specific to travel and it’s not readily apparent that you can use the Wave to organize group travel, it only takes a few smart people to figure out that the Wave is a useful tool for this purpose before it spreads through the social web. The advantage that Wave has over other planning tools is that it is completely social and everyone knows that planning group travel is a social endeavour.
- Fight the Wave or go with the flow? So, now that the cat is out of the bag, do you build that group travel planning site or do you just give up and concede defeat to Google? There is always room for innovation and for specialization. Although the functionality is all there to support group travel planning, chances are most agents and consumers are going to use a tool that is specifically travel related. So the opportunity now exists to use the Wave as inspiration to build a better group planning tool.
Josh Steinitz, CEO of NileGuide, for example doesn’t see Google Wave as a threat.
He believes that travel planning tools are only one part of the equation and that the content is the most important element.
“At NileGuide, we see the starting point for our mission as delivering great recommendations about what to do on your trip. So the trip planning tools are simply ways to make those recommendations actionable for the real-world needs of organizing a real trip itinerary.
“However, at the end of the day, the tools aren’t what will stand up to competition, but rather the content combined with the functionality. Google Wave has real potential to change the preferred means of person-to-person communication from standard email to real-time conversation and collaboration, but real trip planning still requires a database of actual content to be useful in the real world.”
James Dunford Wood of World Reviewer is even more skeptical of Google Wave’s impact noting that the open nature of widget development, that Google promotes, makes it hard for really good widgets to succeed.
“What’s needed is one definitive open trip planning widget where suppliers can feed in their inventory into one interface via open standards (XML APIs).”
Being an ardent supporter of open standards (like the OpenTravel Alliance), I would have to agree that whoever can come up with a way to integrate Wave into a widget that includes open connectivity will stand a very good chance of dominating the space.
I’ll be curious to see what develops in this space in 2010.
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About Stephen Joyce
I totally agree. Something I’d been planning to post about in similar vein. The other interesting point you don’t mention here Kevin is that one of the first companies to develop an app for Wave was Lonely Planet… Wave’s functionality PLUS LP’s content… now THAT could maybe be genuinely disruptive.
As per your post on Oct 23rd
http://www.tnooz.com/2009/10/23/news/lonely-planet-first-travel-brand-to-have-a-proper-go-at-google-wave/
I do question the sense of spending loads developing a platform when Wave could provide it… who needs a platform like say vtravelled.com or travelmuse.com (just 2 that spring to mind, but doubtless there are many others) if WAVE offers similar functionality?
But how many trip planning sites have enough traction to be worth killing…?
Fair point Douglas!
BTW – Sorry Stephen – some reason I thought Kevin had written this post! My mistake…
This is a valid argument by Stephen and the Wave definitely has the potential to serve as an effective tool. I don’t see it anytime soon, however, for the general public as the benefits need to be made clearly obvious right off the bat for consumer adoption. As with so many Google Labs tools they appeal to those of us who often live and breath the web and are aware of the tools etc. Google has ways to go before the Wave and it’s many possible applications are mainstream.
Also agree with Douglas’ question. There are no significant sites to kill….
@jeremy Your point is well taken. I think the point is that the actual trip planning tool is only one part of the process and that content is still the key driver. It would be interesting to see how many content sites start adding a “Add to my Wave” button. Is that even available yet?
I think there are two important points to note here:
First, I don’t think this is a case of all or nothing. Wave is designed to facilitate communication and to be integrated elsewhere (I’m wondering when blog comments will be replaced by embedded Waves). Trip planning sites should be designed to provide information and resources. The winners will be those who can do the best job of piecing the two together.
For example, Wave can be integrated into a trip planning site as the communication mechanism and the Wave’s contents are then replicated in your friend’s wave inbox, allowing the trip initiator to kick-off the planning with colleagues. Widgets which copy or integrate itineraries or other information from the planning site into the wave can make the propagation of information easier, and other tools like voting or calendar integration can make decisions more manageable.
Secondly, Wave has been judged quite harshly by most people so far. The combination of massive hype, a new paradigm and a product that’s not that refined yet has contrived to give the impression that it’s fallen short of the mark. However, if you can get the ingredients together (colleagues on Wave and a problem to solve) it can be remarkably useful despite a few usability problems here and there.
Ultimately what may change for trip planning sites is that their emphasis will shift towards elegant solutions for finding travel information and integrating that information within Waves where the communication process will be managed. Managing the social element of things can be left to Google (or Twitter or Facebook) and the world is spared having to join the nth on-line network..
Interesting post Stephen and I have to agree with Mark; there will still be opportunities for trip planning sites that are able to bring something new to the equation.
Wave is all about enhanced communication and collaboration, but information is still required to be shared and discussed. Those sites that can successfully recommend new destinations or experiences, ways to travel and routes to take, cheap or interesting deals on hotels, transport or attractions will thrive. Furthermore, it will be the sites that bring this value in a unique way through superior intelligence and / or content that will swim, whereas those that recycle or use stale content will struggle.
Wave provides an exciting opportunity for innovative trip planning tools, since if it works as intended, it will help users to better share information and ideas within or across other tools. Personally, I’m rather excited by the opportunity, but like all good things there is usually some waiting involved…
I think, trip planning sites need to decide if they want to be a trip planning or a content site. I single (trip planing) site can never supply content for the whole world in a depth that it will satisfy all users for ever. It may work for a while for a group of users, but: AOL also thought once that no user would ever need the Web if he has AOL …
In my opinion a trip planning site in the future needs to focus an the assistance of information retrieval, structuring and sharing. A trip planning site I would use should let me retrieve all kind of pieces of information from the whole web, would let me build my own mashup out of these pieces and would let me share this mashup with the people I like.
This may be an existing trip planing site, A specialized Tool/Widget like Gliider (http://www.gliider.com/) or a general collaboration tool like Google Wave extended by travel specific applications/widgets.
In fact, just over the weekend I was thinking how the perfect trip planning tool should look in my option:
I personally would like to see a travel “resarch” tool for travel content like Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) is for bibliographic content.
Advantage:
1) Each user really owns his content (saved locally but can be shared/saved on a server)
2) Open Source
3) Full use of semantic web / Linked Data / microformats
(Even given that these concepts unfortunately are not widely used yet. They will in the future. And if Zotero can parse Amazon, we could extend a travel research tool with parsers for Tripadvisor et al.
*Is there a tool like this? If not, who builds it (together with me)?*
The next to steeps to start the development of such a tool are
Check if there is already a tool like this, or if there are similar open source tools where we could connect to / reuse source code
Additionally we need to discuss the data model, which data do we want to save how.
Where shall we continue to discuss this? Google Wave?
I tried to start a public wave (maybe it worked):
https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Bt0ZqhSBrA
P.S.: Zotero Beta 2 seems not work correctly if Gliider is activated at the same time
Really interesting that some of the response is about trip planning sites that bring something new to the equation but isn’t that what we’ve been saying about travel agents for the past 10 years!
What about tools as http://www.gliider.com/?
I don’think they would kill the planning sites. These tools help people to organize the information they found.
People are always going to research and look for info on more than one site, people who doesn’t have the time to do it would go to a travel agent to fix it.
Linda: travel agents are limited in terms of content by what is in their heads and what they are able to access at their finger tips.
so, yes, they are planners but their primary purpose (you might argue) is to sell holidays, not create trip planning sites based around reams of content.
perhaps.
meanwhile……
surely the smartest trip planning sites will be those that integrate Wave into their own platform?
Kevin:
Yes, “travel agents are limited in terms of content by what is in their heads and what they are able to access at their finger tips”
That is exactly what I have in mind with my proposed “Travel research” tool.
Support a travel agent with a tool, which he can use to organize and condense all the versatile content that is out there in the net.
@Kevin (re @Linda)
The advantage of the Travel Agent is not so much what they know, but the experience they have which enables them to place the information they find into a better context.
For example, I can find a resort on-line in the Maldives that looks great, but can I assess the different types of resorts in the Maldives in terms of their suitability for different types of customers? (if I had been able to do that as a customer then I wouldn’t have spent a pretty miserable week some years ago.)
Ok, I’m off topic here, and biased I know..
Back to Wave – fully agree with you that Wave and the web in general is about integration, so the winners will be the Wave enabled sites. (This comment section would one day be great as an embedded Wave).
For me really astonishing is the fact, that it seems DMOs don´t play a significant role in this process any longer. If potential travellers get their inspiration from flickr, youtube and daytripfinder, their information from wikipedia, rezgo and expedia, their affirmation from twitter and facebook, what is the future role of a DMOs webpage? Should DMO workers instead of publishing on the destinations website rather be the personal DMO expert joining a travel-wave discussion?
Reinhard:
I think DMOs should generate professional content as much as possible AND enrich this content with semantic information. Then you can push this content to platforms you think are relevant, but also offer this content on your own server for whoever wants it.
@Reinhard: That is a very valid comment. What I don’t see happening is an integration of trip planning tools into DMO websites. In many cases that would be the ideal situation for the customer who lands on a destination site based on a search result. Rather than focusing on their content there needs to be more openness to work with the innovators and also to add UGC to their own content.
@Harald I think, DMOs would like to so, all they need is a set standard of sharing data.
@Joe as you know, most of DMOs are public financed. The destination is defined by the stakeholder rather than the tourist and these stakeholder expect equal treatment. The transparency of actions makes it sometimes difficult for front line employees. Integration of UGC-platforms might be a solution.
Lots of great exchange & perspectives. Here’s my take – I will use two personal examples to illustrate:
Google Wave is definitely a revolutionary tool that enhances collaboration – both in real-time and when sequentially replayed.
It seems obvious that it can be used by travel agents to assist with complex itineraries and group movements.
The challenge with Wave is not the power and potential of the platform, but the product planning creativity required by travel organizations to identify, adapt and create a set of Wave extensions, gadgets and robots that provide solutions to practical challenges.
A similar example wold be the world’s first spreadsheet – VisiCalc.
I encountered program at Cornell loaded on an Apple II. A lot of people took one look at the lettered columns and numbered rows and asked “Why would I want to use that? I can do the same thing on a calculator, faster.”
The statement was very true – for a simple arithmetic calculation. Most people not only saw little use for, but intentionally avoided multivariate and reiterative “what-if” calculations. The “Keep it Simple Stupid” approach yielded pretty good answers – not many people cared if they were the best answers or if there was a more efficient approach.
The rap on Visicalc was that it was harder to use than a basic accounting program because one had to BOTH layout the form AND design the formulas – what a pain. The liberation provided by introducing creativity and flexibility was lost on most. Visicalc answered a question most people rarely asked.
A small group of students immediately recognized the platform’s potential, realizing that accounting homework would never be the same… But we didn’t stop there – as a lead teaching assistant for a class with 400 students, I turned Visicalc into a database using the revolutionary @sum, @avg and @count functions. There was even a very cool @lookup that could query a student’s grades in the table.
What normally required about 2 days of chaos to integrate final project and exam grades into the semester grade book and calculate a term grade now took about 2 hours.
Before we saw Visicalc, we weren’t complaining that we needed a database or a spreadsheet – We simply discovered a new tool and quickly figured out how to apply it to a time consuming and error-prone task.
Currently, e-mail programs, instant messaging, RSS feeds and widgets with specialized uses on customized web pages all work great, but that does not mean that there is not a better way.
Google Wave breaks the paradigm of a “Web of Documents” and ushers in the era of a “Web of Data.” Years from now, looking back, people will be asking why we messed around with unsynchronized links to outdated web pages when the pertinent piece of information could be updated constantly via robot and communicated in real-time to all interested users.
The best immediate use of Google Wave I see is in a travel agency as a collaboration platform between travel agents and travelers.
I will use my upcoming family holiday trip as an example: Family of four; both parents working; older daughter in another state attending college; younger daughter over-involved in school activities. Limited opportunity for a group family vacation planning session.
Questions:
Destination? (Warm Weather)
Duration? (Would younger daughter need to miss any school?)
Cruise or Resort?
Best use of air reward mileage?
Efficient use of hotel reward points?
Need for a rental car?
What in-destination activities?
Total budget?
Subjecting a travel agent to such a nebulous and fragmented set of requirements would have been cruel & unusual punishment. However, if the agent had a tool that could organize available information, enable collaboration and logically work through the options, tremendous value would be added to the travel planning process.
Google Wave would seem to be ideally suited to the task – assuming that there were some appropriate extensions and gadgets developed.
I didn’t use Google Wave to put the trip together – instead, I ultimately relied on Gliider, TripIt, CruiseCritic, TripAdvisor, Continental, DynamicTravel, NCL, Starwood, Hyatt, Hotwire, and Thrifty plus a half-dozen local destination sites for tours and excursions to plan a seven-day, multi-island Hawaii cruise with two days on Oahu before and after.
If I wasn’t so embedded in the travel industry (and a self-confessed travel researching/booking masochist) a good travel agent using Google Wave as a platform to organize & present options would have been a much simpler process.
It would have been ideal to have the itinerary broken down by day with various travel options under consideration available for review, with all parties being able to contribute to the process.
A travel agent planning group travel could gain even greater efficiencies by using Google Wave to help decision makers gain alignment, establish priorities, understand compromises and determine the best decisions.
It may take Google Wave some time to gain acceptance and penetrate the market, but it seems unlikely that with such a powerful real-time collaboration platform, it is only a matter of time before some innovative applications are developed to streamline complex travel planning tasks.
Thanks for that comment Robert. I think it was actually longer then the original post. I think you are right that Wave could be a very valuable tool for agents. My experience has been though, that most agents are so entrenched in their code based searches that it would take a very long time for most to switch to a tool like Wave. Any agents out there who want to give it a whirl and let us know your thoughts? If you want to try it, send me an email at sjoyce[at]tnooz.com and I’ll even send you an invite.
I agree with this concept: “What’s needed is one definitive open trip planning widget where suppliers can feed in their inventory into one interface via open standards (XML APIs).”
That’s a great approach from a consumer perspective – one interface with all the data they need.
Problem is there are so many travel providers that share data while competing – airlines vs agents; hotels vs OTAs; GDS vs IDS.
There is some level of convergence in travel technology, as evidenced by OTA standards and data sharing. However I suspect in this case we’ll see divergence as each travel entity tries to create their own ‘wave’.