Articles tagged “trip planning”

WorldMate suffered as many smartphones and other services added free travel notifications. But TripCase and TripIt still have fans among many frequent travelers.

In 2017, Americans' travel aspirations may reflect the country's political divide. We're still waiting to see how Trump's promises to tighten national borders will affect the trips people book this year.

Gogobot likely paid some big bucks for the Trip.com domain, and it is making strides with a high-quality recommendation app. Still, everyone in the travel space, especially startups, is feeling like they are running uphill as Google tosses boulders downward. Slow, steady steps may win the day.

Google already had Google Maps when it added Google Flights in 2011 and later hotel metasearch and booking. With the launches of a destinations app, which pairs flight and hotel bookings, in 2015, and now the Google Trips app for organizing reservations and making tours and activities recommendations, Google's travel business is slowly, if steadily, becoming pervasive. Google can afford to bide its time -- it is, after all, Google.

Should competitors be concerned that Destinations on Google is a harbinger of Google's global takeover of trip-planning and the travel industry? Don't be paranoid. Plenty of companies can out-compete Google but its dominance of search and ability to make traffic disappear on a dime are ongoing headaches given that the playing field tilts toward Mountain View, California.

The travel startup scene is littered with the corpses of social trip-planning services. But Foursquare's check-ins are a gold mine of data, and it's smart enough that it knows this is a nice-to-have feature, not a business in itself.

Old school isn't always a nostalgic, vintage throwback. Sometimes it's just the smartest way to do things.

If you are thinking of launching a travel startup, please read this before you waste years of your life, and become old, gray and bitter.

Established trip-planning sites, whether they deal in individual travelers or groups, are not fearful of this acquisition.

Although most travelers research more than a dozen sites when planning a trip, information and direction shared by official tourism boards are key to building awareness of a destinations' offerings and opportunities.