Trippy, Kayak, MyTab, Tui Travel, and China’s airlines all appear in our roundup of the stories making news and driving opinion on 17 October.
SOCIAL COMMERCE
Nicknamed as a ”Pinterest for travel” Trippy has let go of some top executives and its full marketing team, according to sources. Tnooz’s requests for comment from three employees went unanswered yesterday, though the site is still functioning and its Twitter feed and its CEO are still tweeting. The startup is funded by Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, and SV Angel.
US-based travel gift and planning platform myTab claims it has reached more than 100k visitors a month. Other stats for the year-old startup include a 38% return rate and an average 5.5minutes spent on myTab. Top purposes in order: Study abroad, family trips, vacation, business. Average gifting $50 per person, average saving $20 per user. [Tnooz has profiled myTab.]
DISTRIBUTION
Between now and 2015, Tui Travel is rolling out “flat pricing” across its distribution channels. The company will also add service charges for consumers (at less than 1% of the price of the vacation)Â who choose to book through an in-store staff person. Tui Travel hopes the fees will move consumers to book online, where no fee will be charged.
DIGITAL MARKETING
Kayak has sorted through a year’s worth of data, or about 1.2 billion queries. Its advice for consumers? “Book domestic US trips 21 days before departure” and “book international trips 34 days before departure.” Former editor of the Washington Post’s travel section, K.C. Summers, interviewed the metasearch company about its findings of “the best days” to book travel for an article in AARP magazine.
AIRLINE TECH
About 20% of Chinese airlines will offer in-flight wi-fi by the end of next year. Chinese officials say “the rest of the Chinese fleet will be covered by the end of 2015.”
THANKS!
Tnooz hopes you have an effective day. Feel free to e-mail us your tips, theories, and ideas for social travel startups that will be profitable.
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About Tnooz
Thank you SO much for this mention. We’re also now scaling our back-end database so it’s more robust. We’re seeing customers starting to plan travel around 12 months in advance and even though the data is, erratic (naturally), patterns are starting to form. Doing something absolutely new in an industry will obviously generate staccato results but the foundation is now there. This is really interesting data we’re accumulating. People do plan far in advance and now we’re grabbing even more information about customers and their traveling friends, their trip purpose, frequency of interaction with myTab etc. As we gain more combined (never individual) pre-travel data, we’ll share this. We’re so excited about grabbing truly unique stats that will prove to be quite an eye opener for both customers and the industry. Stay tuned
Hi Heddi,
Interested to see what myTab does next.
Best,
Sean
This is not surprising news about Trippy going downwards. I don’t feel that the functions were useful or thought out.
Aravind,
Thanks for your comments, though my heart naturally goes out to anyone who may have been let go.
Sean
@Sean – we have a bundle of major objectives up our sleeve within the next few months so we’ll keep you posted, absolutely! The new robust data portal we’re building though – oh, that’s the kind of stuff that makes us giddy excited. And this data will be incredible for suppliers who can be socially involved with our customers during travels, generating a more organic relationship. Our priority is to protect customer data. Our second priority is to ensure that what we share (combined data) is a game changer benefiting both customer and suppliers.