What else is going on in the world of travel tech? A round-up of other stories from across the industry. A special tours and activities edition…
- The New York Times reports that Peek has raised $1.25 million from high profile investors including Eric Schmidt (Google’s chairman), Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) and Square, SV Angel and Khosla Ventures.
- Travel guide service TripWolf is working on a joint project with tour and activity platform TourRadar to develop a mobile application for Tourism Tropical North Queensland. The pair have built apps for iPhone and Android devices, as well as a Facebook app, which gives users access to travel content for the region as well as details of local tour operators and other services.
- TourCMSÂ has updated its API and now provides the capability for in-destination mobile bookings that requires last minute true availability data direct from local suppliers (versus the industry standard allocation and release at 24/48 hours prior to travel).
- Pocketvillage partnered with GoMio to integrate tours and activities into the GoMio Dashboard. Together they will offer travelers personalized recommendations on local things to do and experiences in their destination. Through Gomio’s close integration with Facebook it is able to tap into the social and taste graph. Through Pocketvillage’s precise interest-based categorization and geo-tagging the pair aim to come up with the “perfect match”.
NB: Disclosure – TourCMS CEO Alex Bainbridge is a Tnooz Node.
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*Shameless Self Promotion* Another development in tour and activity tech. Travergence launches free Facebook app for activity providers: http://www.travergence.com/providers
Alex: Kudos on your update. That is absolutely huge news. Very exciting.
Thanks Donald ! Think that makes 2 of us who think it is interesting anyways!!!!
In destination mobile bookings should be big for tours & activities – but no one has access to the live availability data from the local companies – and allocations that are released a few days before travel – well they don’t solve the “sat in a hotel room at 10pm at night thinking what shall we do tomorrow problem” that consumers have….
So mobile in destination bookings can ONLY be solved by companies like us…….. and, er, happy to make the data available of course!
I should add, its not just about the correct availability data (although that is hard enough), but having the functionality to support the suppliers to take last minute bookings – e.g. SMS messaging the correct tour leader, bus driver etc…… that is where the actual clever bit is!!
L’esprit_de_l’escalier and all that
Nice addition Alex. Be interesting to see how many operators can give live data right up to before a tour departs.
One issue I am sure you have thought about is guide allocation. To give true live data a operator will have to have standby guides who an be allocated right at the last minute, so this will involve in house process changes for most operators if they are going to do it well.