If someone told you that they aggregate things and someone else told you that they curate things, would you know the difference?

In the travel business, these two ways of distributing products and services to travelers are quite different.

The problem is that travelers are generally unaware of the difference and, as a result, don’t understand what they are getting when they look for experiences through a curator or an aggregator.

Let’s first define the terms.  According to Oxford, the term “aggregate” means:

verb /agrigayt/ combine into a whole.

The term “curate” means:

verb select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).

Already you can see that the verbs mean entirely different things.  Aggregation implies combining a variety of objects to create a whole, whereas curation implies selection, organization, and care.

In the travel business, aggregation is very much the combining of distinct sources of product and delivering it as a single unified list of products from which the traveler can choose the best product for their needs.

In the case of airlines and hotels, this would be done using a combination of direct connects and GDS connections. When a traveler searches for a given location and time of year, the system scours through the various sources for the best matches and displays the results.

The system makes no judgments on the quality or appropriateness of the product but rather provides an unbiased (or so it would seem) list of matching results. In the case of the aggregator, the accountability of the product or service delivered is usually left to the supplier who actually provides the service since, in most cases, the aggregator will make it clear that they do not take responsibility for the deliver of the service.

Curation is a very different approach to delivering products to consumers. Although there may be an aggregation component to the curation process, primarly for the purposes of sourcing the products for curation, the curator is then responsible for selecting the products that they feel are the best fit for their customers, organizing them, and maintaining them in the collection.

When a traveler searches for experiences from a curated source, they are relying on the experience and expertise of the curator to ensure quality, viability, and credibility of the source.

In the case of curation, the customer may not even know the source until after the booking is made relying entirely on the reputation of the curator.  It’s a little bit like the old saying “Any friend of Jim, is a friend of mine”.

To the traveler, it may be difficult to know whether a travel site is an aggregator or a curator just by looking at it.  One way, I have found is to look at their tag line or mission statement and see if they fall into either of these criteria:

• The site is most likely an aggregator if it claims to have the largest number of sources (ie. hotels, flights, car, whatever), promotes the number of locations or properties/flights (ie. 50,000+ hotels), and offers customer reviews but does not provide it’s own reviews/editorial.  Many online agencies and metasearch sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Kayak would fall into this classification.
• The site is most likely a curator if it claims the best selection of products from reputable sources, promotes the quality of the products over the quantity, offers a combination of customer reviews and editorial, and manages & updates the source content directly. Many experiential travel sites like Viator, isango!, Kijubi, Expedia’s Activities/Attractions, TravelDragon, and others would fall into this category.  The reason why most of these sites curate is partly because aggregation of content for experiential product is almost impossible given the lack of standard distribution standards and systems.  Curation does occur in other more traditional segments such as hotels.  The Mr & Mrs Smith site, for example, would be considered a curation site for selected boutique hotels.

In the end, the two methods for distribution offer their own benefits.  Aggregation will most likely offer the most number of choices and require the consumer to filter and sort based on their preferences.

Curation, on the other hand, will provide a fewer number of choices defined by the curator’s preferences and presented as a collection.  Both options are valid and serve consumers in different ways.

How effective the two options are depends a lot on the reputation of the brand and the trust the consumer has with the site.  In the end, both approaches provide consumers with choice and that is never a bad thing.

Pic: Espos.de on Flickr and Shopkitson.

Viator founder and chairman Rod Cuthbert launched a new venture, Qewz, a news website that aggregates editorial content of almost every stripe.

Thus, as Qewz details the storm about BP’s Tony Hayward going sailing with his son, the website anchors its coverage with a BBC story, but then offers a variety of other views using pieces from an ABC News blog, Politico, CBS News and The Spoof.

Qewz details the day’s headline-grabbing stories from the left, right and every opinion in between with an editorial process that offers a lot of manual intervention, which will “decrease somewhat” as the computational linguistics of co-founders John Lowe and Jordan Digby further automate the news curating, Cuthbert says.

Cuthbert, who took the chairman’s role at Viator more than a year ago, doesn’t cite News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch specifically, but he sees Qewz as helping to formulate answers for traditional print media, which have found that “the current model doesn’t cut it.”

Cuthbert says the media are looking for “quite radically different ways to deliver the news” and it’s his hope that Qewz would contribute to the process and become an acquisition target because of its “technology and approach.”

So, then, what is Qewz’s business model? Is it advertising, subscription or a hybrid?

Cuthbert says Qewz has adequate funding from the three co-founders and angel investors and is solely focused on building traffic, not revenue.

He says introducing advertising would push the company in a different direction.

“We don’t want to pollute or confuse our efforts,” Cuthbert says.

With traditional media “getting decimated,” Cuthbert sees a parallel to the situation of the traditional travel industry in the mid-1990s when it, too, was struggling to come to terms with the Internet.

Anything that causes the consumer to become “amused and engaged” with the news would benefit traditional media as they search for new approaches and models, Cuthbert says.

But, will aggregating news help form an answer?

Cuthbert notes that Viator, too, gathers the “best offerings and the best suppliers,” but adds value in the process.

“This collection of articles is not just a random choice like you see on Google News,” Cuthbert says, pointing to the added value.

Cuthbert, who’s no longer involved in Viator’s day to day operations, got the idea for Qewz during his travels when he noticed that the slants on the day’s news varied widely depending on his location.

Cuthbert acknowledges that Qewz is “U.S.-centric for now, but we’ll get to the U.K., Australia and the rest of the world soon.”

Unlike Viator — which is Latin for traveler — Qewz has no meaning.

It’s a four-letter domain that rhymes with news, Cuthbert adds.

The company also owns Qews.com.

Online activity and tour agency Isango is creating an iPhone application aimed at giving travellers in-resort access content and, eventually, booking facilities.

The app is currently under development and is likely to go for submission to the App Store approval process during the summer of 2010.

Initially the app will be content-driven and simply showcase material and products available from cities on the Isango platform.

Officials say they expect to stagger the launch of the product so different destinations are added over time.

The launch of such a product for Isango does raise a number of issues around product booking, vice president of commercial Deepak Jha admits, thus why the app will initially only consist of content and other information.

Ordinarily, Isango takes a booking for a product and gives the user an email receipt. Jha says currently many of the product suppliers on the Isango system may be reluctant to accept booking confirmations on a mobile handset, limiting the app to being an in-resort booking tool.

Isango hopes to add booking technology into the app over time and once its suppliers agree to digital booking confirmation.

Mobile destination booking has other complexities that need to be tackled, says Patrik Oqvist, European managing director for Isango rival, Viator.

Sites such as Viator and other destination product agencies often have a 24 to 48-hour grace period between when the user makes the booking online and details are sent to the supplier for inclusion on customer manifests.

A real-time mobile booking facility for such activities would need to overcome such problems as, once again, booking in-resort is likely to require a far shorter time scale.

TLabs focus on startups featuring Switzerland-based GetYourGuide.

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

GetYourGuide consists of five co-founders from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). Other than that, we have two full-time student interns, two part-time student interns and one external consultant who used to work at a key competitor.

The managing and founding team (average age is 27.4!) – CEO: Johannes Reck (MSc Biochemistry, visiting associate Boston Consulting), COO: Pascal Mathis (MSc Electrical Engineering, product manager Siemens Switzerland), CTO: Tobias Rein (MSc Electrical Engineering, many freelance IT projects), Marketing: Tao Tao (BSc Economics, president of a leading European student consultancy). Web Design: Martin Sieber (MSc Biology, freelance designer).

In addition, we have Roland Zeller (founder and CEO of travel.ch, the leading Swiss OTA) on our board of directors and as a business advisor.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The company is partially self-financed (friends and family) and partially funded by the Zurich Cantonal Bank’s (ZKB) start-up financing programme. ZKB is the third largest bank in Switzerland.

What problem are you trying to solve?

• B2B: Lack of a standard in the activities market with its many opaque and bilateral value chains.
• B2C: Lack of product and price transparency in the activities market because you never know who the actual supplier of a certain activity is. And lack of diversity: it is difficult to book long-tail and sometimes more interesting products unless you do cumbersome Google searches. Our philosophy is to give customer as much choice as possible and as powerful filtering tools as possible.

Describe the business, core products and services?

GetYourGuide is an online intermediary connecting end customers with suppliers of tours, attractions and activities. We contract sightseeing tours, adventure activities, multiple day tours, attractions passes, and many other products for the FIT market. On our website, suppliers can upload and manage their products themselves and under their own brand.

Customers can book these products through our website and our extensive distribution network. For OTAs, affiliates and other distribution partners, GetYourGuide provides tours & activities content with real-time information directly from the original suppliers.

GetYourGuide’s strength lies in sourcing and selling the full spectrum of tours & activities via transparent, automated and true e-commerce distribution.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

• B2C: internet-savvy travellers looking for fun things to do at their destinations and willing to spend money on it.
• B2B: Any website that wants to use our content, but mainly OTAs (out of those that don’t already use Viator or Isango), hotel chains (we have Hotel.de, the German subsidiary of Hotel.info, already on-board), tourism boards, and long-tail website such as blogs and destination information websites.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Our initial platform was very close to ourexplorer.com with both amateur and professional tour guides. Most of the bookings we received then were from the few professional suppliers we had on our platform.

So we switched our business model to only allow professional suppliers and focus on products instead of guides, and made a large change to our user interface. We then pitched the prototype of this second version to potential investors.

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

Commission fee from bookings. Ads on our destination pages: both AdSense and banner advertising with strategic partners such as official tourism boards of a certain destination.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Automated and fully-fledged back-end system for suppliers, which keeps variable costs low. That means we can scale easily in terms of bookings.
• Real-time information about price and availability for B2B partners.
• Greater product diversity: Able to tap into long-tail content because we can handle both free-sale bookings for volume suppliers (e.g. London hop-on hop-off bus tour) and on-demand bookings for long-tail suppliers (e.g. bike tour through Hanoi).
• Possibilities for expansion in German speaking area where Isango and Viator don’t have a strong presence yet.
• Cooperation with tourism boards because of supplier transparency
• Speed: 1100 products in 4 months and our acquisition speed is accelerating.
• Low burn-rate. The activities segment is one where timing is tricky. It is almost necessary to educate the market (both suppliers, B2B partners and customers), which takes time.

Weaknesses:

• Lacking product variety compared to Viator/Isango. We only have 1100 products, which we acquired within 4 months of active acquisition.
• Difficult to compete on SEO because we are competing here with both our suppliers and aggregators like Viator and Isango. Same with SEM.
• Acquisition speed can be a boomerang: suppliers need to be kept happy so we need to drive bookings to them fast, which can be difficult in the short-term because our strategy is long-term.

Opportunities:

• Huge untapped market potential globally and especially in the German-speaking area.
• No online standards in the market because most of the global activities content is offline
• Trend towards value-added travel where people are not content with just staying at a hotel anymore. People want to experience more and are willing to pay for it, too.
• Customers are getting more and more comfortable with booking travel online.

Threats:

• Is the market (suppliers, B2B partners, customers) really ready for booking activities online? If so, why hasn’t Viator succeeded in 10 years?
• Based on Porter’s 5 Forces, the threat may not come from competitors but more from substitute products such as Google Tours, Yelp, Google’s new place pages, online guides like Tripadvisor and Tripwolf, and simply better on-location procurement of tours and activities, i.e. through local tourism bureaus and better marketing presence of ground handlers (suppliers) at their home destinations.

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

Some executives at hotel chains, OTAs and large tour operators who either argued that 1) the activities sector is too crowded or 2) people do not pre-book activities online.

Why didn’t we listen? Mainly because we think nobody has quite got the activities sector right yet. We think that none of the incumbents are striking a good middle ground between creating a complex GDS for tours & activities or simply driving bookings.

The former solutions tend to demand too much from suppliers (CRM systems, XML feeds, etc) which hinders building enough global content and the latter does not do anything to innovate the market or drive standardization (lack of transparency, lack of diversity, etc). Nobody has the content online and we can get that content online.

On the issue of pre-booking behaviour: we think it’s a timing issue and there are lots of points of decisions for potential customers, such as pre-trip emails via our distribution partners just to mention one example (Expedia has been able to create two-digit conversion rates from pre-trip emails).

Ultimately, we think that the opportunities in this market are too large to be ignored. In this final frontier of online travel distribution, whoever can get it right, will be the next big thing in online travel.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Close to break-even. Close to the product variety of Viator, which  has around 5,000 products.

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.

Destination activities and tours agency Viator is to open four new country sites in Nothern Europe as part of its ongoing expansion programme.

The company is to launch local language sites in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, joining dedicated sites for the German, French and Spanish markets already up and running.

The roll out of specific country sites is paying dividend, Viator claims, with the France, Germany and Spain sites “contributing as much 30 percent of the gross bookings to some of Viator’s top 10 destinations”.

Managing director of Viator Europe, Patrik Öqvist, says:

“It is remarkable that three of these countries collectively rank sixth in travel bookings across Europe and beat out the UK in online travel sales, with the highest online adoption across Europe.

“We are excited to be entering all four of these important markets, a clearly receptive audience, enabling not only Viator but our suppliers and affiliate partners alike to more effectively target this savvy group of travellers.”

Recent research from PhoCusWright indicates the attractiveness of the Scandinavian marketplace for travel companies – Denmark, Norway and Sweden between them are sixth in terms of travel spend in European.

Online penetration in the region is also running at 45%.

Viator is launching its mobile platform this week, as chief executive Rod Cuthbert hinted at in an interview a few months back.

The dedicated mobile platform will be available on Apple iPhones and other smartphone handsets and will allow users to search across 5,000 activities by destination or keyword.

Perhaps most importantly for the platform, Viator is allowing users to book products via the handset – a critical element of destination-based services so that travellers can select tours and activities when on location.

The system will also allow users to be connected directly to Viator agents to book over the phone.

Viator’s editorial content will be featured on the mobile platform including 100,000 traveller reviews and photos.

When considering an online travel startup you tend to think about three approaches:

• taking on an incumbent at their own game, but executing better
• creating a whole new category that you can dominate, as long as you can make that category desirable (no point dominating a category that no one is interested in)
• assume that the market must be massive so if you can only capture 1% you will be fine

All three approaches require consideration of barriers to entry. If you are startup up you have to consider what barriers competitors or incumbents have put in place – e.g. do they have a bigger consumer brand, do they have more data, do they have mature technology partnerships with lock out clauses etc.

If you are the company that is currently in a dominant position you look at the equation the other way around. On every project you look to make it harder and harder for new entrants to come and take a piece of your pie.

Hence a great deal of an entrepreneur’s time is taken by active consideration of building or bypassing barriers to entry.

So, take TripAdvisor’s primary barrier to entry.

TripAdvisor has a mammoth website (approx 60 million pages in the Google index featuring 25 million reviews). That is a significant barrier to entry for any new review based travel startup.

You would have thought with such a grip on the review market as TripAdvisor has that they don’t need too much help to maintain their position. However it now comes to light that Google are assisting TripAdvisor to maintain the status quo.

The Google Adsense API is only available to websites with over 100,000 daily page views. Whilst this doesn’t sound a particularly high number it does mean that the API is only available to the top few thousand websites. Startups need not apply (and will have to be content using Google Adsense via the omnipresent JavaScript widget).

But what is the Google Adsense API and how does it affect all this?

The Google Adense API permits API consumers to return an HTML snippet of Google advertising (Adwords) that can be manipulated prior to serving onto the final browser consumer. It can also be stored for later analysis.

e.g. this advert box on TripAdvisor comes from Google Adsense API:

Unfortunately, when this text is displayed as in page content it also appears on Google search results. Here you can see TripAdvisor ranking higher than Viator, but with the two TripAdvisor results using Viator advert text:

You can see the Viator advert text appearing as part of the TripAdvisor results.

Viator have blogged about their reaction to uncovering this problem.

So are we all happy that TripAdvisor has access to this API from Google but other startups don’t? Is there a real benefit here or are people overreacting? What do we think about text from adverts being used as snippets within the main search results?

• Daniele Beccari (VP Isango, a Viator competitor) tweeted from a personal standpoint: “I stand with Viator against TripAdvisor”
• Scott McNeely (director: consumer & affiliate web at Viator) called it “highly annoying and, at the extreme, not the Internet we signed up for”

Me, I think TripAdvisor are being astute in how they use the Google Adsense API and business is business. However I do consider it unhelpful that Viator’s advertising text should appear in the snippet shown on the Google main search results as if it were TripAdvisor’s text. Google should address this in order to keep their advertisers happy.

Formed in 1995 in Sydney, Viator, with its Paris Chocolate and Pastry Food Tours, as well as the traditional Moulin Rouge gawking fests, is all grown up.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with regional offices in Las Vegas, London and Sydney, the privately held global tour and activities provider is expected to do about $87 million in sales in 2009.

And, that’s not peanuts for a company that acts as an intermediary for suppliers ranging from big guys like Paris Vision, but more commonly for a disparate legion of mom-and-pop ground operators around the world.

I caught up with Viator CEO and president Barrie Seidenberg, and founder and chairman Rod Cuthbert, to see where this whole thing is headed.

First, here’s some hard news.

• Viator, like everyone else who knows what’s what, is catching the mobile bug and hopes to debut an app in the fourth quarter.
• On the heels of launching native-language websites in Germany, France and Spain this summer, Viator is mulling – and probably already working on – the launch of a pan-Asian website in 2010.
• The pan-Asian website most likely would focus on travelers from Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Today, Viator’s core business comes from Americans traveling to Europe, but Viator is hoping to further diversify its customer mix.
• The company believes a next step in its evolution may be to build out its websites to incorporate more general travel information beyond activities. This might include content that isn’t always “actionable,” Seidenberg says, including information about suggested itineraries and other “things to do” at global destinations.

And, Viator, hoping that trip-planning sites like TravelMuse and post-trip management solutions like TripIt and Traxo get up-to-speed, could partner with these sorts of players and others, and provide them with such content.

Seidenberg sees a “hole” in this travel-information arena, and she points out that TripAdvisor’s compilation of things to do in San Francisco, for example, “is a little bit of a hodge-podge.” She wasn’t taking a shot at TripAdvisor, explaining that the hotel-review site probably hasn’t focused on this destination-information niche.

So, with more than 1,000 affiliates, including Priceline, Opodo, Zuji, British Airways, Fairmont Hotels, Wyndham Hotels and city websites like sydney.com.au and newyork.com, and its offerings of tour content in some 75 countries, the 14-year-long journey for the Sydney start-up has been full of surprises and erroneous assumptions.

Cuthbert says Viator was “completely wrong” 10 years ago when it thought that the bulk of its bookings would occur within the booking path of online travel agency websites.

Today, as it turns out, Viator gets about 20 percent of its business from third-parties.

Part of the reason may be because, as Viator learned, many consumers prefer to kick back and book activities in a separate Web session, well after the “stress involved” in booking flights and hotels, Cuthbert says.

The travel agency and GDS channel, too, didn’t bring the anticipated up-tick, and years ago Cuthbert berated the GDSs for the shortcomings in their UIs for Viator inventory.

On the competitive front, Amazon has its Barnes and Noble, and Expedia has its Priceline, Travelocity and Orbitz, but no strong global rival has emerged to take on Viator, Cuthbert argues.

Which doesn’t mean that Viator lacks for a fight. It has plenty of competitors and potential interlopers, including Expedia, Isango and American Holidays, but most of Viators’ rivals are regional or niche players. And, suppliers themselves may also emerge as foes.

And, of course, Viator took care of at least one regional competitor, namely LookTours in Las Vegas, by acquiring it in 2006.

Cuthbert adds that Viator has been aided in its rise by the immense fragmentation of activities’ and tour suppliers, adding that these partners generally prefer one strong manager of their relationships than having to deal with a bunch of intermediaries.

The latter statement, of course, has a tinge of marketing spin to it since activities’ suppliers are apt to appreciate the presence of a few viable distribution partners to dilute the power of a sole major player. Does anyone recall Expedia’s and hotels.com’s dominance of U.S. online hotel distribution a few years back? And, it’s nice to have both a Priceline and a Hotwire.

And, in our unofficial trend-watch here, Seidenberg says organic traffic is heading upwards, with more than half of Viator’s business coming through unpaid means. Still, the paid traffic is profitable, she adds.

Cuthbert points out that the paid-search arena is a whole different phenomenon for Viator than it is for hotels, for instance. “There are not a lot of people bidding against us and there are not a lot of fluctuations” in keyword pricing for destination activities and tours, Cuthbert says.

Back to an earlier point, I was thinking about the lack of traction Viator found in the traditional travel agency community years back, and I was wondering, too, about how the wholesale/tour operator industry views Viator these days.

So, I phoned Bob Whitley, the president of the US Tour Operators Association (USTOA), to get his take on Viator’s place in the competitive landscape.

Sadly, Whitley said he had never heard of Viator.

This assessment should not be viewed as a knock on Viator’s role as the leading online player in destination activities. It is more a reflection of a head-in-the-sand approach by some sectors of the traditional wholesaler and agency communities. [I said some sectors: There are plenty of travel agencies on Twitter etc that are modern-thinking and aware, and Mark Travel, to name a wholesaler, is doing some interesting things online and in cable TV.]

About Viator’s market position, Henry Harteveldt, Forrester Research’s principal analyst in travel, concurs with Cuthbert’s and Seidenberg’s view. Harteveldt says Viator is “clearly in the forefront” in terms of market stature, but he warns that Viator must stay focused.

“Viator is the leader of the pack but I think it will become an increasingly crowded pack,” Harteveldt says.

Harteveldt says the advent of cheaper technologies and advances in payment systems may propel competitors who can expand more rapidly than Viator did in its climb.

And, Harteveldt believes that Viator should not short-change that so-far disappointing OTA booking path. Viator should ensure that it doesn’t disrupt the hotel and flight booking path on OTA sites, but it should keep potential customers informed that tours and attractions await them further upstream.

Says Harteveldt of the OTAs and Viator: “You don’t want to get between the dog and the supper dish, but you want to let the dog know what’s available for dessert.”