22 November 2008 ~ Comments

Battle of the Trip Planning Sites

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The PhoCusWright 2008 Travel Innovation Summit was a showcase for two major types of websites.  The first was Vacation Rentals, undoubtedly because of the recent PhoCusWright study about Vacation Rentals, and the second was trip planning.  There were a number of trip planning tools represented at the show including:

This graph shows trends in popularity (according to Alexa.com) for Uptake.com, TripWolf.com, and TravelMuse.com.

TripWolf.com was not a participant in the Travel Innovation Summit, but they were at the PhoCusWright 2008 Conference.  I included them in this comparison because it is interesting to me that both TripWolf.com and Uptake.com have a very similar growth pattern in their ranking and almost identical current Alexa rank given their start times were also almost the same.  What I find intriguing is that Uptake.com is US only and TripWolf.com has a very strong Europe focus and they both aggregate destination data in totally different ways and yet they would appear to both be very successful (at least in traffic).  Uptake uses search mechanisms to aggregate and pull together information in an automated and almost mechanical way wherease TripWolf.com uses user generated content and community contribution to aggregate reviews and unique content.  Which model will win in the end?  What do you think?

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  • First of all I want to tell you, how beneficiary the techniqual development is. I´m the director of lammertal.info, a small dmo in Austria and due to many occasions it was impossible for me to attend the conference. Reading posts like this is very helpful - thank you.
    Concerning your question it is indeed a kind of dilemma for a destination. Until now, dmo´s where providing content on their websites. Content on other plattforms mainly was static, if it was dynamic content (e.g. for bookings) there was a database system which was used.
    Now the number of planning tools and websites explodes, nearly each of them has an individual system in the background.
    Appart from major destinations like cities and big brands, it will take quiet a long time until smaller destinations will be appropriately presented on these websites, the percentage of contributors amongst visitors is very low. Due to lack of personal and financial resources it is also nearly impossible that dmo´s contribute to each of the new tools in a valuable way.
    If destinations provide up to date content on a system like wikitravel, travel tools use these content and complement it with customer reviews this might be an efficient strategy.
  • Steven, it was nice meeting you at the conference. Looking forward to figuring out how to work together...we think "what you do when you get there" is what travel is really all about, and one of the next great opportunities in the industry.
  • I would certainly include TripCart.com, one of the presenters at 2007 PhoCusWright.

    Using the more reliable compete.com, TripCart has much higher traffic than TripWolf and TravelMuse. Traffic has tripled in past year.
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