TravelMuse and Facebook are talking, back and forth.
Many websites enable you to share content and ideas with your Facebook friends. But, TravelMuse’s new Travel Planner , unveiled today, takes your Facebook friends’ comments about your trip and saves them back to your TravelMuse trip folder.
So, trip planning and sharing become a two-way street.
The geeks at TravelMuse executed the back and forth Facebook sharing by leveraging Facebook Query Language, which allows applications to use “a SQL-style interface” to access comments and posts from a user’s stream or profile through other Facebook APIs, Facebook states.
The new Travel Planner, which debuts with a homepage redesign, represents a sea change for TravelMuse, explains CEO Russ Lemelin, Â a former interim CEO at SideStep.
“We were a content site that had a planner,” Lemelin says. “Now, we are a planning site that has some content.”
Taking its inspiration from trip-planning websites like gliider, which enable consumers to research throughout the Web and drag content back into gliider, the TravelMuse Bookmarker has been revamped and rendered more interactive with maps and organizational tools.
It has a toolbar button which enables users to save images, web pages, text and comments from throughout the Web to personal trip folders.
“You can’t really compete with the Web when it comes to content,” Lemelin says.
“If we are trying to get people to use us and not visit anyone else, we are swimming upstream,” he adds.
Among other new functionality rolled out, the planner enables users to save Web research about a San Diego restaurant to Cape Cod bike tour on an interactive map, where consumers can create schedules and retrieve related information. Any venue with a geolocation can be plotted on the map.
The maps have a bunch of tools, including a scheduler to organize trips, and Wikipedia is integrated, too.
While TravelMuse has ceased leaning toward a goal of being a one-stop-shop for trip planning as it acknowledges that consumers freely roam the Web, TravelMuse still offers its own guides, which can be incorporated into trip folders.
The whole idea behind the new planner is to make travel research easier so consumers don’t have to lug around guide books, print reams of  Web pages and email links to family and friends as they plan their vacations.
Of course, the hope is that opening up TravelMuse to the broader Web will lead to a lot more consumer engagement, which in turn would boost page views and the company’s media/advertising business, Lemelin says.
Lemelin has a lot of respect for gliider, but claims “no one is close to us” in trip planning because TravelMuse not only facilitates saving Web content, but enables consumers to organize and schedule their research, as well.
Another differentiator with gliider, Lemelin says, is that gliider is a downloadable tool [like SideStep was in its early days] and many consumers fear downloading client software.
So, with the proliferation of travel-planning websites like gliider, TravelMuse, UpTake, NileGuide and dozens of others, are any of these businesses making any money?
Lemelin likens the travel-planning landscape to the beginning of travel metasearch.
“We didn’t make any money when we started,” Lemelin says, referring to SideStep, which Kayak bought for $196 million in 2007. “There is so much déjà vu for me. Travel planning is still in its nascent stages.”
Whether, as Yogi Berra says, this is “déjà vu all over again,” remains to be seen.
Related posts:
- Executive shake-up at TravelMuse as CFO Lemelin becomes CEO
- Why the fuss over Twitter when Facebook is the place for travel?
- EasyJet taking social media seriously as Facebook booking engine comes a step closer
- Jungle fever at OpenTravel as talk turns to Google, ITA Software, Apple, Facebook
- No Internet Explorer was a drag so Gliider drops Mozilla-only premise
I really like this move by tmuse. There are too many content sites, so trying to use that rather than compete with them is definitely the way to go. Now I have to head off and see why no one has bookmarked us yet according to their bookmarker page!!
@sam – naughty users
On a side note, the answer to the question posed in the fourth-to-last paragraph is “yes, for several years”. Although in fairness the ones I know of don’t call themselves ‘trip planning’ or ‘travel planning’ websites, they are just sites where travelers come to plan their trips
Hi Sam
‘sites that travelers come to to plan their trips’ I’d be really interested to know which sites you think do a good job of this if you have a mo!
Ta
Jeremy
This is a good move by Travel Muse. The average travel site a year or two from now will look more like a web application as opposed to just a content site. Facebook connect, makes this much easier for travel sites.
And travel is the ultimate social activity, so it makes sense to for a travel site to be connected to a social network.
I like what TravelMuse is offering and the new site functionality but I still notice the same disconnect between research/planning and the booking process. Case in point: There is a great 15 day Northern Italy trip on the site that somebody has put together with different cities, rail transport between them, local services and more. Now, where can I book this exact trip without having to start the process all over again on some external booking site?
If that process is not fully integrated I don’t see customer satisfaction ratings for the overall process going to improve.
Thanks for the great post Dennis and Tnooz and for the encouraging comments.
@Joe, I think this is the huge challenge that people search multiple sites planning and booking their trip, industry research average is 22 sites. With our original, more limited bookmarker, we found that our users had bookmarked over 5,000 different sites! By having the ability to bookmark sites you can include and surface local transportation websites. I don’t think that one site will really be able to do it all.
@Sam, will check on those Tnooz bookmarks stats
@Fiona Exactly. So, when will some tech start-up solve that challenge for the consumer?
That’s where the focus needs to be to improve the disappointing satisfaction rates for online travel planning and buying. Part of the technology does exist. It’s a matter of co-operating and integrating rather than working on stand alone solutions.
@Joe Cough cough… standard messages… cough cough