SkiftSeedlings: An early peek at five more early-stage travel startups

This is our second post in our new weekly series that provides a glimpse at early-stage travel startups and websites.

The first roundup from last week can be found here. If you know of any early-stage travel startups that either you’re involved with or have seen on the web, drop us a note through our contact page or send us a tweet at @skiftnews.

Gatherball is a grouptrip planning website where users can create a timeline of a trip, plan events, invite other friends to view the trip, and leave comments for one another. SkiftTake: Group trip planning is still a largely untapped niche market within the travel startup world, but it’ll take a very smooth and easy-to-learn UI to become the go-to site for groups larger than two.

Minube is an early-stage startup in the U.S. but a veteran in Spain, Europe, and South America. The website and app aim to inspire travelers and tie the booking stage as closely to the inspiration step as possible. All of the content on the website and the app is created by users.  SkiftTake: The U.S. site still lacks basic functionalities like flight search and hotel bookings that are key to its success in other countries. It will need to grow its English-language user base in the U.S. to start populating local guides before it really takes off in North America.

Sillk doesn’t share much information at all, except on its Facebook page where the company claims, “When it comes to making your travel experience just perfect, we reckon we’ve thought of everything.” Unfortunately, they’ve forgotten to optimize the site for Safari since users can only sign up for beta in Google Chrome. SkiftTake: Just what we were looking for – another pretty inspirational travel site. Even if this one is Wes Anderson-pretty.

Trablr is an online travel agent that only considers peer-to-peer sharing services for its travelers, or trablrs (“one who travels using only share sites”). It looks at car shares, apartment rentals, desk rentals, social meals and more for a trip completely organized around the sharing economy. SkiftTake: Although the sharing economy is currently taking off, Trablr is taking a risk by betting its success on the long-term profitability of other companies like Airbnb, lyft, and LiquidSpace.