Travel Onion, a three-year old, US-based startup, relaunched this month to become an aggregation service for about 120 daily deals sites along with blogs and contests.
Each week, the site will post and send and out an e-mail newsletter highlighting the best deals from major daily deal sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Jetsetter, Travelzoo, and SniqueAway.
The goal is to spare travelers having to read through multiple flash-sale sites to find a deal. It does the homework for them, so to speak.
In 2010, Cal Simmons launched Travel Onion in Alexandria, Virginia, as a content-aggregation site with travel news blogs from major world cities.
The previous blog-aggregation focus was, in Simmons’ words:
“a bit of a miscalculation. We invested time and effort into the previous site focusing primarily as a blog collections site with some travel contests and no deals. In previous years we underestimated the public’s desire to find deals and contests and now hope to capture their attention through our new, re-launched site.”
In 2011, Simmons created Luxury Hotelist booking site, building on the success of his other consumer-facing site The Best Hotels of the World. He is one of the most prominent independent travel agents in the US to fully embrace digital media.
Simmons says Travel Onion currently receives 10,000 unique visitors a month, and he aims to scale that up.
Travel Onion is a self-funded company that has three other team members and makes money through advertising and affiliate fees from bookings. Its strategy is to monetize primarily through ads.
The first marketing effort will focus on promotion in major publications, such as International Business Times and Business Traveler USA.
It’s a long way from 1976, when Simmons founded his own travel agency, Cal Simmons Travel, which grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
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