John Peters, the president and CEO of Tripology, says Rand McNally acquired Tripology on Friday as the 154-year-old map and travel guide company transforms itself into an online and location-based online travel company.

The move breathes new life into Tripology, a lead-generation service for travel agents which had fallen on hard times weeks ago when an investor pulled out of the company.

It also ends weeks of speculation about who Tripology’s suitor was after Peters had announced that Tripology had signed a letter of intent with an unidentified company.

Peters says the Tripology brand and operations will remain largely the same as Tripology becomes a Rand McNally property and one piece of the puzzle as Rand McNally transitions into an online, trip-planning company.

Jeff DeKorte, the former general manager of AOL Travel who was brought in by Rand McNally to strategize about Web strategy, says Rand McNally is in the midst of transforming itself from a traditional, print-based company that focused on selling maps and globes, into an online travel company which offers mobile-based services.

Among immediate changes, Tripology’s headquarters will relocate from Manhattan to Skokie, Ill., where Rand McNally is based.

Peters will run Tripology and become Rand McNally’s vice president and general manager of digital strategy.

Tripology, which has 14,000 travel agents signed up to use its lead-generation services, employs five staff, including Peters, and discussions are under way with the parent company about staffing levels.

Peters talked to Tnooz today at the TravelCom conference in Dallas about the acquisition. One year ago, TravelCom designated Tripology as its innovator of the year.

Peters says Rand McNally’s purchase of Tripology for an undisclosed sum almost immediately solves several of Tripology’s problems — brand recognition, consumer traffic and distribution.

Peters acknowledges that it had been costly for Tripology “to get in front of consumers.”

But, according to Compete Inc., Rand McNally had 757,000 unique visitors in January 2010, down from a 2009 peak of almost 1.2 million unique visitors in June.

Tripology had 33,600 unique visitors in January, Compete says.

DeKorte says Rand McNally has a broad vision to become an online trip-planning company and the strategy is evolving.

The move to become a a force in online travel coincides with the ascendance of a new Rand McNally management team which Patriarch Partners, the owner of privately held Rand McNally, brought in several months ago, DeKorte says.

Peters emphasizes that with the lead-generation service becoming a Rand McNally property, Tripology remains “all about travel agents.”

He emphasizes that the acquisition means Tripology now will have the resources to develop more travel agent tools, including social-media features and lead management tools, which had long been delayed.

Says Peters: “We had a to-do list a year-and-a-half long.”

TLabs focus on startups featuring Canada-based TripSourcing.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

We are two young entrepreneurs and this is our first business. Guillaume Gosselin (aged 29), a graphic designer of ten years in web and marketing agency, cultural newspaper, design agency and a printer. Chantale Villeneuve (aged 26), a tourism technician and administrative assistant for three years. We also contract with Sampitech technology, an agile development team, web marketing and SEO specialist.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Tripsourcing is financed by bootstrapping and love money. We have contacted angel financing but we never had favorable responses.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Today, everyone with an internet access can give comments in online travel guides about accommodations, places or restaurants they visited. In order to prepare an itinerary there is now an abundance of extraordinary ways to obtain informations: online travel guides, community, blogs, prices comparison, social networks, etc.

The choices are numerous and it is very difficult to not get lost in this overabundance of information. This profusion created a huge gap for every web novice or for experimented traveler wishing to rapidly obtain tailor-made travel itinerary that match their current needs.

Tripsourcing stands as a web tool that will let you build up and manage a trip diary, as well as finding out which places are the ones that make locals tribes truly proud so that you won’t miss a thing.

Tripsourcing’s goal is to create an ecosystem we’re passionnate travelers will find and promote in your Trip, unique accomodations, restaurants or activities for your destination. We simplify the online travel planning process by providing a better and unique planning experience to travelers.

Describe the business, core products and services?

With the rising power of social networking, everyone becomes a local media. With Tripsourcing, local residents and passionnate travelers voice their opinions and help travelers to make better itineraries by working closely with them. All participants and contributors to itinerary request are awarded with Dollotrips for their advice and assistance. With it, they can buy gifts in our store offered by business owners.

Favorites are at the core of Tripsourcing. They are all the accomodation, restaurants, activities or places and locals are their fans. Our SuperPromoter can pack their suitcase with favorite attractions, accomodations or restaurants. Every Favorite earns them Dollotrips. The more they pack, the more they earn and the more they contribute to help travelers in their itinerary planning. Other members will promote their packed Favorites too.

Travelers can explore our site to find and pack popular Favorites or they can add an exclusive new Favorite in their suitcase to promote it later. Every Favorite has a kiosk and SuperPromoter can get exclusive customization privileges on it.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our first key customers are the locals. We want to encourage them to explore the web and to share their neighborhood with our traveler that come to tripsourcing to find help in their planning.

Our second key customers are the small business owners. Tripsourcing offers an exceptional way for them to deliver their message directly to worldwide real-time Influential travelers. Our members give them the permission to customize their marketing and to promote their business to them. As a business ecosystem based on coopetition, Tripsourcing offer the chance to see, participate, influence and assist their prospect or to engage and encourage our SuperPromoter to do it for them.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Over the past two years we have seen the market for online travel is booming. We have received a lot of feedback from people who think that planning a trip online is a complex task and that our idea will really help them. Currently many players in the tourism industry are watching us and looking at our evolution: travel agents, DMO or small businesses.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We have Dollotrips: 100 dollotrips = 1$ (Can). Our Dollotrips will be the core of our business model. Travelers will need to have Dollotrips to get e-coupons for gifts. They will earn Dollotrips by helping travelers but they will also have the possibility to buy Dollotrips. Our business owners will offer e-coupons to be sold in the shop. By purchasing these e-coupons, members will be eligible for a 15% discount on the real value of goods or services included in the coupon.

Members will be able to buy virtuals goods and to show or to share what they have bought to their friends.

Business owners will need to have Dollotrips to promote themselves on Tripsourcing. Tripsourcing’s potential for hyperlocal marketing is awesome. Imagine, though, a traveler will receive tourism targeted ads and advice from their travel destination. As a small business owner, the concept is powerful and offers great opportunities. They will also have the opportunity to generate leads with the help of their SuperPromoters by rewarding them with Dollotrips. Also, travelers or SuperPromoters will be rewarded when they succesfully complete a survey, published by one of our business owners.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Negatives:

• High level of competition in this industry.
• Difficulty to find a way to monetize it.
• Small tourism businesses have low marketing budget.
• Our limited funding
• Our small team

Positives:

• Location-based app boom like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loops, Tellmewhere etc.
• Originality of our ecosystem and the Dollotrips rewarding/reputation system.
• The growing interest of small businesses for the social web.
• The growing popularity of online game and virtual goods.
• Our influential and ready to buy members (travelers)

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

In fact, no one really advised us that our idea was not going to be successful. In the early days of our concept we have received constructive advice of Montreal Startup that allowed us to properly adapt the concept to the market reality. We are an agile team and

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We will be successful if we have 100,000 SuperPromoters and 10,000 business owners as members.

We also want to release an iPhone app that will help our members to add favorites by checkin-in with their phone. This application will also be used to display e-coupons near them and buy e-coupons directly in our business owners venues. Worldwide Locals superpromoter will be able to trace travelers with this application to meet them. They will be able to share dollotrips in person.

NB: Tripsourcing is also in French under TonTrip.com.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

To be featured as a startup in TLabs Showcase or to demonstrate a new product, email Tnooz for more details.

Nasa

Hopes of continuing the open source travel content project Earth.org appear to have come to an end with the site disappearing into the digital ether this week.

When the site’s co-founders said they were pulling out of the project two weeks ago, somewhat controversially blaming users for not telling their friends about the site and naturally increasing traffic, some believed that the community of writers and users would step in to save the project.

Unfortunately, Earth.org is no longer, amid speculation that the domain name was also sold earlier this last week.

Some suggested the domain was available at a trim $13,000, but enquiries have yet to yield a definitive price.

According to WHOIS, co-founder Mathias Stricker is still the owner of the Earth.org domain. Attempts to contact those behind Earth.org have also failed.

The apparent demise of Earth.org will sadden many who saw the project as a neat collaboration of well-meaning travellers and developers, yet the consequences of launching a content-based business into an already crowded travel planning corner of the web appear to have been tougher than expected.

Travel content and planning service GeckoGo has released results of a survey of members and their willingness to jump on the iPad bandwagon – but in short: mixed results.

The company asked 750 travellers using its Facebook application whether they would be interested in buying the latest in Apple’s long line of devices and just one in five of those who had heard of it (71%) saying they were very interested in the product.

A further 18% say they are interested and another 30% somewhat interested.

Some might read it as overwhelming enthusiasm for the new product (68% of the two-thirds with recognition of the product), but given the rapid rise of mobile and its travel functionality and seemingly yet another device to consider, it may be just the “very interested” respondents that would go to the next stage and buy the product.

Nevertheless, 60% of those interested in the product would take the device on their travels.

Of the top potential uses, those very interested in the iPad say…

• Browse the web – 68%
• Email – 62%
• View pictures – 61%
• Travel on travels – 60%
• Watch videos – 46%
• Listen to music – 45%
• Read eBooks – 37%
• Play games – 17%

The interesting thing to note here is that two of the major elements of the iPad demonstrated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at its launch in January 2010 (games and reading books) are at the foot of the usage table.

Google Maps broadened its features with the introduction of “Nearby places you might like,” solidifying its role as a vehicle to plan your hotel stay, dining experience or activity.

No, Google Maps isn’t necessarily a hotels.com, TripAdvisor or a Zagat killer, but it sure is becoming a nifty place to begin trip-planning, with its plethora of user reviews, photos, videos and basic information about hotels, restaraurants and activities — and now alternative venues in the area.

So, if you search for the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square on Google Maps, you’ll find that Google has aggregated information about almost everything you might want to know about the property. If you scroll down the page past the basic property information, the photos, videos, map and user reviews, you’ll find “Nearby places you might like” and it looks like the following:

Nearby Places isn’t flashy and it is flawed, but it does provides a handy way — with links, star rating and user reviews — to search for other area hotels.

You’ll notice that although the New York Marriott Marquis is a four-star property in the very touristy Times Square, Nearby Places provides links to the 2 1/2-star Pennsylvania Hotel, as well as to Hotel Gansevoort, which isn’t exactly nearby or similar with its location  almost two miles away in the meat-packing district.

Google says of Nearby Places: “You’ll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.”

Thus, some further refining may be in order if Google’s goal is to eventually furnish similar, nearby places.

You can use the new Google Maps feature to search for nearby restaurants and activities, as well.

For example, if you are looking for an activity to replace — or to supplement — your visit to NorthStar Trekking in Juneau, Alaska, Nearby Places points you to the following venues to consider.

Thus, Google Maps is continuing its evolution into an online destination guide.

The only thing missing is an integrated booking engine.

TheHotelGuru was languishing in the widening pit of hotel content sites on the web until WorldReviewer came along with a plan to reinvigorate it as part of a wider reorganisation of its hotel strategy.

WorldReviewer has taken an undisclosed 50% stake in the company and plans to relaunch the brand in February with a focus on providing exclusive editorial content and consumer-focused lists.

James Dunford-Wood, co-founder of WorldReviewer, says relaunching TheHotelGuru on the WR platform will be the start of a series of projects to boost the site and provide a hotel system for WorldReviewer.

TheHotelGuru was run by well known UK travel writer Fiona Duncan until the acquisition. She will stay on board to coordinate editorial content, but WorldReviewer will now effectively operate the sales, functionality and content management system through its own technology.

Dunford-Wood admits WorldReviewer has “struggled with hotels” since its launch but hopes having an offshoot brand to provide content and listings will give the accommodation part of the site a new lease of life.

WorldReviewer hopes to eventually run a hotel booking system through TheHotelGuru which by extension will power the hotel section on the main site.

TheHotelGuru, Dunford-Wood says, will pen content about hotels regardless of whether the property eventually signs commercial deals with it – an area, he says, many hotel content sites have failed to do.

WorldReviewer will also work on a trip planning widget in 2010.

The acquisition of the 50% stake has also brought about a change in corporate identity with WorldReviewer, its ad serving system AdNet and TheHoteGuru now coming under the broader banner of James Media.

Dunford-Wood’s co-founders are Al James and James Blackwell.

I am a logical fellow, at heart just a code developer, hence when I look at what is happening I tend to analyse from what is possible, regardless of probability.

Code developers have to handle the one in 1,000 chance that a particular section of code will run hence we have to consider everything. That is just how it is.

But our logical minds don’t work quite so well when it comes to business.

Business seems to be more about emotion and connections than about whether something works or not.

• A to B – Take for example the humble online travel agent website (OTA). Historically they have been designed around how to get customer/user from A to B. User chooses departure (A) from a dropdown list. User chooses destination (B) from a dropdown list (that may or may not have updated depending upon the choice made in A). Simple. Basically this is how travel agent systems worked so early travel websites were bound to reflect that. Some argue that this meant that consumers were more likely to want to select destinations they knew.  Long Tail destinations (that would have been suggested by an experienced travel agent in a human conversation with a customer) were not popular.
• A to anywhere – Next we hear about inspiration websites but, frankly, I haven’t seen one that I really like yet. Some local single destination inspiration websites are noteworthy, but no global sites that help with choice of destination in the first place. What is an inspiration website? In essence it is an A to anywhere website. You are in a fixed place where can you go? Most have to earn their income from media or commission from flight sales as with almost unlimited destinations it would be impractical for a company to have interesting commercial deals in every single destination that was in their inspiration tool.
• Anywhere to B – This is the logical combination that my code developer mind keeps coming up with. If you are going to have A to B and A to Anywhere surely there has to be an Anywhere to B option. It’s just logical. Except no one seems to be running a service with this combination. Thousands of A to B OTAs, tens of VC-backed A to Anywhere inspiration websites. Can’t think of any Anywhere to B sites/services.

Who would want such a service? Well many existing destination based travel companies for a start. Events also.

Imagine you sell tours in Morocco. All you really care about is how to get people to Morocco.

You have customers arriving from UK, from USA, from continental Europe, from Middle East etc. What you want is a really nice iframed content source that you could put in your website and explain how to make your destination attractive (reachable) from all sorts of source markets.

Doesn’t have to actually sell the flight ticket (for commercial/regulatory reasons) – just make the end user aware that they can actually get from Paris to Morocco for their 1 week holiday and who to check flight availability with.

The point about Anywhere to B is that there is money here. These destination websites/companies have real customers, real transactions. They are crying out for some kind of clever iframed/affiliate system.

But travel entrepreneurs have gone down the A to Anywhere route – complex, hard to monetise and technically challenging to build something that can come up with great advice to all sorts of different use cases.

Perhaps 2010 should be the year that startup entrepreneurs park the fancy concepts and focus on back-to-basics revenue generation? Anywhere to B would be a great place to start.

It dawned on me recently that like so many other Google apps, Wave has the potential to disrupt the crowded trip planning site arena.

If you haven’t received your coveted Google Wave invite, don’t worry, you probably will soon.

The problem is that once you receive it, it really doesn’t do much for you until you find some contacts to Wave with.

While working with Graham Robertson, a Canadian blogger who lives in Australia on an interview that we were conducting via the Wave, it occurred to me that the tool would be particularly useful if I were planning a trip with a group of people.

Here is how I imagine it would work:

I would invite a few of my travel mates to join a wave.

We would start the conversation around the destination or activities we would want to do, share some files, links to sites we find, maybe even some photos that we upload.

Sort out the details in real-time and store the entire conversation on-line.  We can all go back through the conversation at any point in order to pick up stuff we’ve missed or add comments and replies as we go.

Once the decision is made, we could even upload copies of reservations or bookings directly to wave to store and share with everyone in the wave.

So, two important questions:

• Why this could be a planning site killer? Simply put, it’s impartial, it’s multi-purpose, it’s available, and it’s Google.  Although the Wave is not specific to travel and it’s not readily apparent that you can use the Wave to organize group travel, it only takes a few smart people to figure out that the Wave is a useful tool for this purpose before it spreads through the social web.  The advantage that Wave has over other planning tools is that it is completely social and everyone knows that planning group travel is a social endeavour.
• Fight the Wave or go with the flow? So, now that the cat is out of the bag, do you build that group travel planning site or do you just give up and concede defeat to Google? There is always room for innovation and for specialization. Although the functionality is all there to support group travel planning, chances are most agents and consumers are going to use a tool that is specifically travel related.  So the opportunity now exists to use the Wave as inspiration to build a better group planning tool.

Josh Steinitz, CEO of NileGuide, for example doesn’t see Google Wave as a threat.

He believes that travel planning tools are only one part of the equation and that the content is the most important element.

“At NileGuide, we see the starting point for our mission as delivering great recommendations about what to do on your trip. So the trip planning tools are simply ways to make those recommendations actionable for the real-world needs of organizing a real trip itinerary.

“However, at the end of the day, the tools aren’t what will stand up to competition, but rather the content combined with the functionality. Google Wave has real potential to change the preferred means of person-to-person communication from standard email to real-time conversation and collaboration, but real trip planning still requires a database of actual content to be useful in the real world.”

James Dunford Wood of World Reviewer is even more skeptical of Google Wave’s impact noting that the open nature of widget development, that Google promotes, makes it hard for really good widgets to succeed.

“What’s needed is one definitive open trip planning widget where suppliers can feed in their inventory into one interface via open standards (XML APIs).”

Being an ardent supporter of open standards (like the OpenTravel Alliance), I would have to agree that whoever can come up with a way to integrate Wave into a widget that includes open connectivity will stand a very good chance of dominating the space.

I’ll be curious to see what develops in this space in 2010.