5 New Travel Startups Aim for Smarter Pre-Trip Planning

This week’s roundup of travel startups looks at services aimed at travelers in the pre-trip planning stage. Although they are scattered across the silos of the travel industry, their similarity is that they use data and insights to help travelers make smarter decisions.

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>> Fiz is a destination content platform that aggregates data and information from across the web to educate users about their options in a specific place. Fitz recently opened its platform to businesses and signs its first partnerships with TUI Travel’s boating company Le Boat.

SkiftTake: Snagging a big-name customer like TUI Travel is a good sign for the future of Fiz’s business-friendly platform for place content and discovery.

>> Hulabuk wants to show travelers what hotel managers already know about their room rates. The hotel search site lets users compare room rates for one month, identify seasonal trends, and see price differences based on hotels’ stars ranking.

SkiftTake: Hulabuk is a hotel search site for the experienced traveler who is willing to go deeper into the analytics involved in room pricing to get the best bang for their buck. The occasional leisure traveler is more likely to stick with standard search options.

>> Stay.com is a social travel site that just released a new app with 1,000 city guides based on recommendations of local experts around the world. Users can also use the app to create their own mobile guides, plan a trip with friends, and access destination information offline.

SkiftTake: There’s never been higher demand for local curated travel information and stay.com already has a following that will help spread the word on this new app.

>> TravlerBench helps travelers choose and compare travel destination based on 8 trip types and 80 preferences. Users can then search destinations on a map based on their ranking or compare specific destinations to see how they stack up.

SkiftTake: Many new travel sites today attempt to get to know their users in order to recommend the right destination, but most travelers already know where they’d like to go and are looking for the most affordable way to get there.

>> Obliko Morale is a company committed to building customized trip itineraries. Employees work with customers to organize flights, hotels and rentals and build out a plan with varying degrees of flexibility.

SkiftTake: There are a number of startups built around trip customization, but none seem to realize that travel agents have already done that for decades.