The heat is on among trip-planning websites gliider and TravelMuse as the two startups have taken their competition — or might we say, confrontation — to Twitter.
gliider started it all this morning with the following tweet:
And, TravelMuse, suffering from a West Coast time lag, Â replied a few hours later:
The spat revolves around the revamped TravelMuse, unveiled last week, in which the trip-planning website discarded its largely walled-garden approach in favor of a bookmarking tool that enables consumers to capture travel content throughout the Web and import it back into a TravelMuse trip folder.
gliider, the younger company which launched last year, has taken that approach since it was in diapers.
I’ve seen this kind of skirmish before when competitors were duking it out.
I recall all of those calls from Expedia about Travelocity (or was it the reverse?)
And, I have fielded a few calls over the years from Priceline about Hotwire (or was it Hotwire about Priceline?)
(Keep the calls coming — I don’t mind them.)
Still, gliider apparently feels that TravelMuse is stealing its thunder and could have done much more if it really wanted to differentiate itself from other trip-planning websites.
After all, plenty of trip-planning websites now have tools which enable users to bookmark and capture content from throughout the Web for trip-planning purposes.
gliider CEO Jordan Stolper wouldn’t elaborate on his tweet, saying it speaks for itself.
In its defense, TravelMuse argues that its relaunched website offers much more than a bookmarking tool and that it has added a bunch of new functionality in its interactive maps, for instance.
TravelMuse director of marketing Fiona Ashley says TravelMuse studied gliider, other trip-planning websites and a bevy of sites outside of the travel industry as fodder for its relaunched trip-planning tools.
“We have more stuff going on on our site than them,” Ashley says, referring to gliider.
And, in its tweet, TravelMuse takes a poke at the fact that gliider is available only as a download, a development that TravelMuse believes limits gliider’s functionality.
TravelMuse CEO Russ Lemelin should know all about downloadable tools because he is the former interim CEO of SideStep, which originated as a client-based tool.
I have to believe that gliider is working on becoming a Web-based tool in the future.
Anyway, the two trip-planning websites are coming to virtual blows in social media — which may generate some publicity for each.
And, there’s nothing like raising the profile of trip-planning websites within the broader travel industry.
So, just for the record on bookmarking tool timeline… TravelMuse had a v.1 bookmarker at launch on 6/9/08
http://www.travelmuse.com/about/press-releases/travelmuse-pr-06-09-2008.htm
“Store trip research found anywhere on the Web by using the simple TravelMuse Bookmarker.”
Gliider emerged from the tech-womb a full year later.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/12/gliider-makes-makes-trip-planning-a-breeze/
In a nutshell, what TravelMuse did with this release is move from being a content site with a planner to being a planning site with content. Thanks for checking out our new features: http://blog.travelmuse.com/2010/05/06/travelmuse-unveils-next-generation-travel-planner/
The TravelMuse site is a lot more than just a bookmarklet. I’ve see both companies present at the PhoCusWright Innovation Summit so I have a fairly good understanding of what each offers. DuffleUp.com (a fairly small player but with a nice interface) also offers a bookmarklet tool that is web-based that is similar in style to the “old” travelmuse widget, so offering a bookmarklet tool is nothing new. If the bookmarklet is all Gliider offers (and at this point that is all I can see) then they really should be looking at forming more collaborations and partnerships with content providers instead of burning bridges.
All I can say is I love it when the gloves come off
Has travelmuse spent 5.6m on the site so far? I wasn’t aware it was that much…
Evernote, anyone?
Sam: $5.6 million is accurate, from Azure Capital Partners.
I use postit notes and Firefox bookmarks. Works for me and cost a little under 5.6 million, though I could do with a wider variety of colours in my post-it notes, so there is scope to spend more.
Cracked me up!
I don’t think anyone has nailed trip planning: it all starts with Google anyway and is much more ad hoc than either of these two are having us believe.
Agreed. 100%
That’s a very big “Create a Trip” button on the TravelMuse home page. The “Create a Trip” button on our site is feeling a little envious.
I laughed at a quote i saw yesterday (not relating to TravelMuse or GLiider)
“Their innovation was to take another company’s innovation,” said seriously at #smashsummit
Seriously!?
Is Travelmuse anything more than a mashup? By that I mean is there any original content in there? All I’m seeing is the usual API/feed suspects like wcities/TripAdvisor/Yahoo.
There used to be original content until the company eliminated it last year. Current blog is mostly a rehash of that content, so doesn’t qualify in my book.
Thanks for giving us a chance to talk about Travel Planning tonight.
@Simon, exactly. The internet is the number one place where people go to get information to plan their trips, followed by friends and family. Travel Planning is an emerging category and no one has nailed it. It took about 8 years for Kayak to emerge as the leader of meta-search so it will take time. In the meantime we all have to innovate, listen and learn to try and figure out the best path, and yes there are many scenarios when it comes to planning a trip.
@Stuart, yes we do have original editorial content and TravelMuse started out more as an online magazine with weekly issues focusing on different destinations, so we do have hundreds of articles written by seasoned travel journalists and local experts. This content is available on TravelMuse and has been integrated into the destination, theme and activity pages on the site (for example http://www.travelmuse.com/destinations/US/DC/washington). We know from user feedback that Trips created by other members provide a valuable source of user generated content. What we’ve also learned is that our members have bookmarked over 5,000 different websites(you can see some of the most popular here http://www.travelmuse.com/plan/bookmarker.htm). You can’t compete with the Web or dedicated content sites
This is the best thing I have read all day! Cool that neither are afraid to take it to the streets.
What about Nileguide buying Localyte? I think everyone’s going for the same space, some with more content, some with less. So, undifferentiated it is.
The issue I see: can anyone make it work, i.e. make the experience of trip planning easy so that one can actually use it in any meaningful way…? And then you have to add tripit to the mix, iphone apps, etc. Or is Siri the way to go – you decide on the spot and forget about all the planning in advance? Or both plan+decide on-site?
I am going to sign up for all of them again, but I must say that I abandon these things in less than 24 hours…
I realise we’re talking about mainstream travel here, but what about the idea that ‘planning’ goes against the grain of real adventure? I registered for a couple of these planning sites today (couldn’t use gliider because I run Safari) and they just seem a little too prescriptive. Maybe user behaviour will change, but my experience was the web-based planning process isn’t natural.
We’re also a ‘travel planning’ business (globetrooper.com), so we’re faced with this issue head on. Whenever we talk about monetizing, people suggest we bridge the gap between idea conception and trip booking by doing something similar to these planning sites. But I don’t see it as an area of value for our intended market. Maybe it is for the mainstream market, or maybe we’re just wrong… who knows?
When I think of the value of experiential travel (again, not everyone’s cup of tea), I think about pushing boundaries, meeting wonderful people, experiencing new things, and gaining a different outlook on life. These planning sites could help in this respect, but it’s tenuous in my opinion. Building a laundry list of ‘things to do’ just doesn’t seem to fit under the umbrella of ‘exploring the unknown’.
Anyway, we certainly don’t have the solution. And we realise there’s a lot more hypothesis testing needed to prove this market. So we’ll just keeping thinking and testing and trying and thinking. At the moment though, our plan is to focus less on the itinerary building aspect and more on bringing people together to break down the barriers of mainstream travel. There’s still a long way to go and many great sites out there (e.g. TravelMuse).
Best travel is always that that is unplanned, but think that isn’t what the above is chasing.
Todd: Trip-planning is like dating. Some people want to plan every moment and suck the air out of the experience. But, planning for some of the basics is OK — and then just let the date or the trip take you wherever it may.
Go with the flow, grab your partners and grasp some adventure.
I’m not suggesting that TravelMuse or gliider become the next Match.com, but they can help kindle a little romance and intrigue in the trip-planning process.
Pedro: I fear you are seeking Henry David Thoreau-like simplicity in trip-planning. It ain’t Walden Pond, but it is indeed a jungle out there and I fear the days of simplicity in trip-planning are long gone.
Trip planning remains the high hanging fruit in the online travel space after the low hanging one of travel booking has been solved by too many sites to count in the fifteen or so years since the first travel websites were built. How to sell someone an airline seat from A to B that was actually the easy part. Even adding a hotel and a car took more time but that’s now taken care of. Unless you, of course, want to visit three, four or more cities then you’re still stuck in no-mans land. If you add the whole process that goes on before those decisions are made it gets even messier and despite a lot of effort by many who keep trying, easy, time saving, intuitive, fun trip planning still seems more like an oxymoron.
As the comments here show, there are as many approaches as there are travelers and to produce a tool that covers all these approaches will probably never happen as people’s habits and behaviors on websites comes again in as many flavors.
Even if that trip planning tool is finally built, it needs to be connected to the booking part of the process or the “click-o-rama” to find all those nice components you collected on a site and book them all in sequence starts all over again. Guess, a lot more millions
will be spent to find solutions that also get traction in the market. In the meantime the money will probably be made by those who keep picking the low hanging fruit that is left.