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It’s March 1st and you’re looking at your calendar. You start to panic, not because midterms are looming, but because you have not made any plans for spring break. The possibilities are endless, and with the Internet at your fingertips you start thinking of ideas: San Diego, Cancun, Vancouver, Sydney? You quickly realize, however, that planning travel online is extremely challenging. There are literally thousands of sites with hotel information, trip ideas, and deals. According to Google and Compete research on Accommodations Bookings conducted earlier this year, the average person visits 18 different sites before even reserving a hotel room. Of course, you also want to solicit opinions of trusted friends and family members who happen to be fragmented across multiple social media networks. Adding to all of this is the need to review blog posts, photos, videos, reviews, and guides; you could spend days consuming all of the content. The process becomes frustrating, almost paralyzing.

Enter TravelAvenue (and Trippy).

TravelAvenue is a site that has been recently dubbed as the “Pinterest for travel”. It gives travelers collaborative tools to manage trip planning and make the entire process more fun, less stressful, and quick. More importantly, TravelAvenue visually curates your contextual information and autonomously builds a personalized experience while you interact with the site.

TravelAvenue in particular has built innovative features to help travelers search for and organize their travel information by establishing:

• A personal and private space on the site where you can collect resources found on the Internet while preparing your trip.
• A button which allows users to classify resources such as cities, categories and addresses, which simultaneously links them to the user’s page and builds TravelAvenue’s own community-based Organization System.
• Crowdsourced user inputs that create “best of” guides. This combines the social aspect of the web with the increased reliance on trip reviews and information from like-minded individuals. In essence, TravelAvenue aims to become a curator for all things travel.

Many travel start-ups have emerged over the past few years because Travel as a category is one that is screaming for innovation. I believe for a company to succeed in this space, they will need to build a system where information is fun and easy to digest, both for novice and experienced travelers.

Source:
http://www.tnooz.com/2012/07/04/tlabs/travelavenue-wants-to-be-the-pinte...