The TripButler wifi device is a small pill shaped unit that fits in your hand or pocket and uses local mobile carrier partners to provide data at a fraction of the cost of a roaming mobile phone.  The device can support up to five devices at a time so it is perfect for a family travelling together or a small group of friends.  Imagine paying for roaming charges on 5 different iPhone or Android devices.  For a one week trip, the unit including 300 MB of data is only 36 Euros or about$50 US.  Considering that a 5MB week long International data pass from Rogers.com costs $75, the savings and value of a device like the TripButler is pretty clear.

Here is a nice little promo video explaining how it works…

Tripbutler Demo Video from Michael Hirschbrich on Vimeo.

You can order a device in advance of your trip and have it delivered to you or your hotel so it is ready to use once you arrive.  The cost of delivery is about $14.  The website does mention a 75 Euro deposit that is refunded if the unit is returned undamaged.

TripButler is providing a 10% discount exclusive to T4 readers who use promo code “BUZA2012“.  For more information about the TripButler and to rent a device, visit their website at http://www.tripbutler.com.

If you have rented the device or plan to, let us know what you think of the service by leaving a comment.

If you think I’m kidding by the way, just take a look at this graph showing the compete rankings for Tnooz versus BreakingTravelNews.com and Travelmole.com, two of the most respected travel news sources on the Internet.

I think you’ll agree, that is a pretty impressive result for a one year old site.

So, here is a quick review of my Tnooz posts in chronological order:

1. Sept. 30, 2009 – Will destination marketers see the opportunities in mobile?
2. October 8, 2009 – Twitter and YouTube are here to stay – get over the fear
3. November 16, 2009 – PhoCusWright puts its mobile where its Moxie is
4. November 17, 2009 – Long Tail Travel innovations at PhoCusWright 2009
5. November 19, 2009 – My sleeper pick from the PhoCusWright innovators
6. December 14, 2009 – Will Google Wave kill the trip planning sites?
7. December 17, 2009 – DMOs and mobile – there is hope for them yet
8. December 23, 2009 – Tour and activity sector has a new light shone upon it
9. January 6, 2010 – Open letter to all airports in 2010
10. February 10, 2010 – How to win with an airline Twitter strategy
11. February 14, 2010 – Silent Bob Strikes Back @SouthWestAir
12. March 29, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – Siri
13. April 5, 2010 – Much to admire, still more to do, with boredom-fixing Goby iPhone app
14. April 21, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – AccessMyID
15. May 4, 2010 – Apple acquiring Siri gives the iTravel project a major boost
16. May 24, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – SiteValet
17. June 1, 2010 – Humans drool, technology rules, or vice versa?
18. June 3, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – Checkfront
19. June 21, 2010 – Aggregation versus curation: Do travelers really know or care?
20. July 7, 2010 – Discover Anywhere launches self-guided mobile tours
21. July 7, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – Vayant
22. August 9, 2010 – DiscoverPad puts destination marketing organizations on the iPad
23. September 3, 2010 – Why mobile is vital for in-destination bookings
24. September 9, 2010 – TLabs Showcase – Tour Wrist

It would appear that my posting schedule is roughly 2 posts per month.  When combined with my other contributions (to the T4 blog and to the Savvy Operator), it’s not a bad schedule.

If you are a travel tech company and would like me to review your site or product, please let me know.  I’m always on the prowl for new and cool travel tech and I have tend to have  soft spot for the little guy (or gal).

Happy Birthday Tnooz and here’s to the upcoming year, may it be as full of innovation!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiritmama

T4: What is the Off & Away elevator pitch?

OA: Off & Away is an online travel service founded by former Amazon.com and travel industry executives. The company offers luxury hotel accommodations through an innovative type of auction game called a Bid-to-Win Auction.
These auctions have resulted in many incredible deals, usually well below 1/2 the going rate and many times for a lot less.

Unsuccessful bidders can book a “standard” room from the Off & Away site using up to 110% of their auction money, accessing the same pool of hotels, rooms and rates found on Expedia and Orbitz — that way there’s zero risk to consumers.

(T4: This is an important distinction between traditional pay to bid auction sites and Off & Away.  The ability to apply bids to a booking may help to reduce the negative impact of losing an auction)

T4: Can you tell me more about who the founders are and what experience they have in travel/tourism?

OA: Co-founder Doug Aley helps steer the marketing and business development teams. Doug has over 10 years of product, marketing, and business development experience across online retail, mobile, and web applications. Prior to Off & Away, Doug was VP of Marketing and Business Development at Jott Networks (sold to NUAN ’09). Prior to Jott, Doug led product management efforts in retail and digital categories at Amazon.com. Doug earned his BA from Stanford University and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Co-founder Michael Walton oversees all things product & engineering. Michael has spent his career focused on building amazing customer experiences at companies like Orbitz Worldwide, where he lead the CRM & personalization efforts for Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com, and Amazon.com in their Digital Media division. Most recently, Michael served as
the VP of Product for Jott Networks (acquired by Nuance Communications in 2009) in charge of product management, product marketing & customer support. Michael has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a BS in Computer Science from NC State.

T4: So how did you finance Off & Away?

OA: Off & Away raised Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group, the venture capital firm behind Amazon.com, Farecast.com (now Bing Travel), VacationSpot (now a part of Expedia) among many other early-stage information technology companies in the Pacific Northwest.

T4: What pain are you trying to relieve? What’s the purpose of Off & Away?

OA: Off & Away is focused on offering exceptional travel experiences to customers in new, fun and unique ways. The company’s core belief is that people deserve to experience more when they travel and when they shop for travel.

T4: Did you have customers validate your idea before you brought the idea to investors?

OA: The Off & Away beta was well researched, developed, tested and investigated by venture capitalists prior to funding.

T4: How does Off & Away make money? Bids, Commissions?

OA: Off & Away’s strategy involves driving hotel sales through online bookings, a business model similar to Expedia and Orbitz whereby the company receives a percentage of revenue on hotel bookings.

T4: Did anyone tell you your idea would not work and why didn’t you listen to them?

OA: No one said we wouldn’t be successful. Like any new business, success comes from trial and error, financing, recruiting, strategic business planning and partnering. Our idea of developing key partnerships with industry leaders provides Off & Away customers with access to some of the world’s most luxurious hotel suites.

T4: Where do you hope to be in a year?

OA: Off & Away success will be measured by increased participation in auctions, a high volume of satisfied customers and positive cash flow in 2011.

You can read more about Off and Away on Tnooz and on Techcrunch.

The new program, “Travel Gems from Bloggers”, is the first of its kind, leveraging pingback technology to find, match and deliver bloggers’ relevant travel stories directly to the page where a user is reviewing information about trip details.

Travel Gems is an aid to travelers and a boon for writers. Site visitors benefit from the personal recommendations found on relevant blog posts by seeing them in the context of their travel research on UpTake. This new resource helps travelers make more informed decisions about their trip, while bloggers benefit from reaching an entirely new audience and building traffic with these new readers.

World Hum, a Travel Channel website, is the premier content partner of the program. World Hum’s travel stories are featured on pertinent pages throughout UpTake. Michael Yessis, coeditor-in-chief of World Hum said, “We’re excited to be able to share some of our award-winning travel stories, and to help travelers discover new ways to see the world.”

Yen Lee, president of UpTake said, “Through ‘Travel Gems,’ UpTake merges two social media communities, travel review sites and blogging to improve the online trip planning experience. “Travel Gems” extends our mission of aggregating the most useful travel information to help consumers decide upon a better trip. Plus, it offers a new source of traffic to bloggers by sending our audience to their sites.”

“Travel Gems” also features blog content from smaller, independent bloggers. While some are specifically travel writers, many others have a different primary focus – from parenting to food to sports. Their featured posts may include the inside scoop about a local restaurant, how to get a deal on tickets at a sporting venue, a favorite unknown beach, or the best playground in the neighborhood – all relevant and useful information for a traveler.

The curated posts featured on the site include the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a teaser excerpt from the blog, to help UpTake visitors determine if they want to read more.

Interested bloggers have two options for participating in “Travel Gems”:

1. Join “Travel Gems” by submitting links to travelgems@uptake.com for review; or
2. Link back to UpTake.com in a relevant post. The link pings Uptake, and alerts the editors that they should review the post for inclusion in Travel Gems.

More information is available at Travel Gems from Bloggers on UpTake.

Why I like Duffel

I’m a big fan of a number of trip planning and guide sites including Nile Guide, TripIt, TravelMuse, and Uptake.  All of these sites are very good at what they do and offer a variety of features that add value to the planning process.  What I like about Duffel is that it is focused on making the planning process simple and elegant.  The current version imports hotels and things to do items from sources like Hotels.com and Viator, but you are not limited to the products available through Duffel, in fact, using the bookmarklet you can add notes, accommodations, and things to do from a variety of sites including the existing travel guide sites.  Most of the features that in Duffel already exist on other sites: the bookmarklet is very similar to the Travelmuse widget, the display of the itinerary is similar to TripIt, and the printable itinerary is very similar to NileGuide’s personalized guide.  What is unique about Duffel is the way it presents the trip planning process to the user.  The Apple influenced design, sticky notes, and note cards are simple to visualize, move, and edit making the planning process a fun experience.  Adding fun to the process can make the difference between using a tool once and using a tool over and over again.

So, will Duffel attract enough eyeballs to gain marketshare and make a real splash in the trip planning space? That’s hard to tell at this stage.  A compelling interface may not be enough to convince users that they should be using a virtual cork board and sticky notes to organize their trips.  But, although the trip planning space may seem crowded there is still room for new entrants.  One possible partnership opportunity would be to look at providing trip planning technology to destinations and other travel guide websites.  Content sites could benefit from having a tool like Duffel by allowing consumers to cut and paste snippets of content that can be saved and re-used.

Have you tried Duffel? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

So what is Google Sidewiki?

Basically, Google Sidewiki is a way of commenting on any site, any page on a site, or about any content on a site.  When you use side-wiki, you have the ability to leave your comments and associate them with a website whether or not the website owner has enabled commenting.  Since the comments are maintained by Google, there is no direct relationship with the website.  Think of it as a virtual grapevine about your site.  You can get more details about Sidewiki on the Google Sidewiki page.

What is the impact on Travel Websites?

My initial reaction to Sidewiki was “Great, a consolidated rating service for travel products”.  In retrospect however, there is a fundamental problem with the Sidewiki approach.  The main problem for travel (and presumably all e-commerce) is that side wiki is too general.  The comments could be about the website, the products, the content, or even a completely unrelated subject.  In a structured travel review site the products being reviewed are clearly defined.  When you rate a hotel, for example, the expectation is that you will rate your stay at the hotel, the service, the condition of the rooms, and perhaps the overall experience.  With Sidewiki, there is no expectation about what gets reviewed in the comments and no specific review criteria.  Comments could even include recommendations by users to stay at other hotels and there would be no defense for the hotel other than to report the comment as abuse.  Even then, I have my doubts as to what comments may be construde as abusive.

So what can you do about Google Sidewiki?

Take ownership of Sidewiki now.  Set the tone of the conversation by being the first to comment on your site.  Invite people to participate, but set the standard and expectations in the beginning.  Add it to your daily check list of social media things to do, right after checking your brand on twitter and seeing how many new fans you have on your Facebook page.  This is just another way to engage with your audience so don’t hide from it, embrace it and make it yours.  When users leave comments, respond to them the same way you do on your blog or other blogs.  Unlike TripAdvisor where you have to post a management response, the barriers to responding are much less rigid, just go ahead and do it.  Because the visitor is already on your site, you have an opportunity to interact with them in a more meaningful way.

I am still unsure about potential search benefits for websites who have Sidewiki comments, but I suppose that will develop with time.  For now, your best defense, as they say, is a good offense.  Be proactive, set the tone for your sidewiki, and monitor it closely.  It may take some time for the comments to happen but, like all things Google, they will happen eventually.

Why City Tours is important to tourism

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

In my opinion, Google has focused on the right target.  This may seem small but think about the data set required to produce City Tours.  They have combined their Google Local Search and business listings from partner directories, geo-tagged the data (presumably with street name data and their API), and then mapped them along with suggested itineraries for major cities all around the World.  City Tours is totally in line with Google’s mission.  The interface seems simple enough and the features are limited at the moment, but the potential impact on in-destination tourism is massive.  Think about all the local businesses like guided city tours, tour guides, bike tours, and the like that can (and will) jump in and add their information to Google Local Search so they get listed.  But developing City Tours, Google stands to add hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of new data points to their index.  Imagine what can be done with that data through various devices.

The Google Revenue Model

Google obviously hasn’t disclosed their revenue model for City Tours, but given their history, it is not unlikely that it will come from sponsored listings.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they sell sponsored listings within the application itself so that suggested itineraries have a set of sponsored businesses at the top of the list.  In Vancouver, for example, that might be the big attractions like Grouse Mountain, Capilano Suspension Bridge, and the Vancouver Aquarium.  All the other listings would be organic listings based on proximity to the sponsored ones.  This is all speculation, but hopefully you can begin to see the opportunity for small business in this space.  In very short order, Google has brought location based services on mobile devices one step closer to reality by connecting the critical data and the technology together in a relatively open way.

The Future for Destinations

DMOs (Destination Marketing Organizations) all over the World should be taking a very close look at what Google is doing.  Google has just saved many organizations a lot of work (and money) in developing and aggregating the technology together for use by local tourism businesses.  Instead of trying to develop totally separate directories and business listings, they should be aggregating this data and feeding it to Google for the purposes of creating richer, more interesting, and more relevant tour experiences.  PhoCusWright research has shown that a majority of travel searching begins with Google, so why not make the results more relevant for travelers.

The Future of Booking

If you follow my work, you are probably aware that I am a believer in the four stages of the travel purchasing process (DREAM-PLAN-GO-SHARE).  Trip planning sites like TravelMuse.com, Uptake.com, PlanetEye.com, and others have been very good at taking care of the DREAM-PLAN steps.  Sites like Expedia.com and Travelocity.com (and many many others) focus on the GO or booking part.  Site like Flickr, Youtube, Bootsnall, WorldNomads, and other social sites take care of the SHARE part.  Google can begin to bring these disparate pieces together in a way that many others cannot.  Currently the map detail provides the name of the attraction, the recommended time to spend at the location, the star rating and the hours of operation.  Imagine the details including a short description, integration with Flickr or Panoramio for photos, contact details (phone number), and a BOOK NOW button.  Now imagine that detail available on your iPhone so that when City Tours recommends the attraction, you can book tickets in advance so you don’t have to wait in line.  For many tour operators this would be a dream come true especially if they are able to drive direct bookings to their own tour or activity booking website instead of having the sale go through an intermediary.

For now it is a bit early to tell what Google will do with City Tours.  As a strong proponent and developer of on-line tools and reservation systems for small tourism businesses, this is a great first step.  With Google shining a very bright light on local businesses, specifically destination tours and activities, I hope that small operators will begin to realize that they have an impact on tourism and that the travel community (and others) will begin to realize the potential of the tour and activity segment that, for a long time, has been largely ignored.

One of the major benefits that small tourism companies have over larger competitors is that they tend to me more nimble and quick to respond to opportunities with technology.  The other clear benefit is that the owner/operator or someone very close to the company can add a human face and element to the organizations social media efforts.  If you have not yet jumped on to the Social media bandwagon and are considering it, here are my top 5 recommendations:

1. Know your goal with Social Media: This seems like a pretty basic point, but it is critical.  You need to define what your expectations are with Social media or it can become a time and energy vortex.  Is your goal to open up communications with your current and potential customers or do you want to write interesting stories that will bring more potential customers to your website?  Both of these are perfectly good goals, but the social media approaches are different.
2. Philosophy NOT technology: Okay, being a techno-junkie this seems counter intuitive, but my point is that your customer philosophy and your goals should drive the type of technology you choose and not the other way around.  If your goal is to build content and engage with potential customers then using a blogging platform is probably the best way to go, but which blogging platform really depends on your comfort level and your technical abilities.  For starters, I recommend using WordPress.com, a hosted blogging platform.  There are many others out there to choose from.  As you become more comfortable with the technology, you can find the one that best fits your needs.  If you are looking to engage with customers in a more casual way then you might consider Twitter, FriendFeed, or even Facebook (now that it is more like Twitter).  These applications present conversations in a “lifestream” format giving people updates on what you are doing as you post them.  They are not good for writing long posts but are very good at notifying your followers of what is going on and for starting or continuing conversations.
3. Walk before you Run: If you have not yet tried social media, I recommend you start slow and begin by joining one or two networks.  Just like on-line bookings, you have to prepare yourself and your products for on-line bookings before you can actually start taking advantage of your tour operator software.  A good way to engage with a social network and prepare yourself for further engagement is to join http://travelblogexchange.ning.com/.  This travel blogging social network is built on the NING platform which hosts many niche social networks.  The benefit with NING is that you don’t have to create multiple logins.  Start by commenting on posts you like, photos that you find captivating, or videos that interest you.  Once you get a feel for participating you can move to the next step of contributing your own content by writing your own blog post or posting your own photos.
4. Be Yourself: Those of you who are Saturday Night Live fans will remember the immortal quote from Stuart Smalley “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!“.  Well, it’s true.  If you are yourself, share your experience and expertise in an open and authentic manner then, generally speaking, people will want to engage with you.  People are drawn to others who share and who do so without expectation of reciprocity.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of negative people on the Internet as well, but when it comes to social networks, the people that you attract to your posts, photos, videos, etc. will relate to the way in which you compose your content.  Positive words feed positivity, negative words feed negativity. It’s really that simple.
5. Pace Yourself: It is easy to burn yourself out with Social media.  At one point I think I had about twenty different usernames and profiles to manage.  Eventually you will find the balance that makes it easy for you to remain engaged with the networks that are important to you and the ones where you contribute the most.  Just like real-life, how engaged you are with a particular network will depend on how much of an impact you feel you have on the community as a whole.  There is no reason not to join a community if you feel that you might be able to contribute to it at some point, but if you find that you are not able to continue contributing becuase of time constraints, then focus on the communities where you have the greatest impact.

On-line social networks are very much like their off-line counterparts.  Your local Chamber of Commerce, business association, or club are all examples of real-world social networks.  From experience, I can tell you that being a member of these organizations requires commitment and time if you expect to see tangible results from your membership.  The same is true for on-line social networks and social media.  The more you participate, the more you contribute, the more impact you will have on the community and the more likely you will be to achieve your goals.

Photo: That’s me going for an ice swim in the Kemi River (I think that’s the name) in Rovaniemi Finland.  Like technology, I believe in just jumping in and giving things a try.

I released the beta code to my 850+ Travel 2.0 Facebook Group members and received some pretty favourable feedback.  I followed up with Scott shortly after to get a little more information and give him an opportunity to tell you a little more about his project.

So what is Travellr?

Based in Australia, for us at Travellr, life is all about rich experiences – getting off the tourist map and doing something memorable that stays with you forever.

Be it searching for underground beats in Bristol, uncrowded reef breaks in Banten, the perfect espresso in Lake Como, or the easiest route from the airport to your hostel at peak hour – in our experience, asking locals and past visitors consistently gets you further than any guide book, travel agent or review site ever could.

We want Travellr to help people find the best local knowledge about anywhere in the world.

We want to give people quick, easy access to qualified local knowledge that’s relevant to them – making their trips consistently incredible.

Some Words from Scott Woodhouse, CEO

SJ: How long have you been in the travel industry? Are your roots in another industry?

SW: We’re new to the travel industry – our backgrounds are in web 2.0 and marketing. We’re both avid travelers, which is where we draw our inspiration for Travellr. So we’ve immersed ourselves in the travel industry and have been learning and observing as much as we can over the past 12 months.

SJ: Where did you come up with the idea for Travellr.com?

SW: We came up with the idea for Travellr while having a beer at our local bar and talking about travel and technology. It dawned on us how important local knowledge is to have a really great travel experience, and that there wasn’t an easy way to find answers to your specific travel questions on the web.

SJ: What is your most important corporate value and how has this affected the development of Travellr.com?

SW: We’re a small startup – so our core values are about staying in touch and listening to our users, immersing ourselves in travel, learning, and making sure we have fun!

SJ: How long did it take you to launch Travellr.com?

SW: We pitched Travellr in Silicon Valley in October last year, and started our development around the same time. It took us three months to build the first internal version, and then two more months of testing and development before we launched the private beta.

SJ: What was your biggest challenge in getting Travellr.com launched?

SW: It’s a real challenge to take an idea off the whiteboard and turn it into software. After exploring ideas and concepts we had to make some hard decisions on what features we would include in the final product. The biggest challenge was keeping Travellr simple to use and staying focussed on the purpose of the site.

SJ: How do you plan on making money with Travellr.com or is that even important?

SW: It’s important to us that the service remains free to our users. We have a few revenue models that we’re exploring, but our focus at the moment is on scaling Travellr to a larger audience.

SJ: What is your favorite aspect of Travellr.com?

SW: We really love seeing people get great answers to their questions. Travellr has unearthed some amazing local knowledge from all around the world!

SJ: What makes Travellr.com different from other travel communities?

SW: We’re the only website to focus exclusively on travel questions and answers and doing it well. Our focus in providing a great Travel Q&A service, and we’re not trying to do things that other people do better – such as travel tips, reviews, itineraries or blogs and online magazines.

SJ: The travel industry is all about interconnectivity, how do you see Travellr.com fitting into the travel technology landscape in terms of  integration or interoperability? (i.e. integrating your connect or system into other websites)

SW: We’re working on a Travellr API that will let other people query our data and take it away and do interesting stuff with. So in the future we’d love to see other travel sites use our API to compliment their own service with relevant content from Travellr.

SJ: What feature would you most like to add to Travellr.com?

SW: We’re really happy with the core features of Travellr, so we want to keep our focus on continuing to improving these. We’d really like to add FB Connect so Facebook users seamlessly log in and access our site.

My Opinion of Travellr.com

I’m always a fan of new innovative uses of technology.  From a technological standpoint there is nothing particularly new about Travellr.com. The site uses an FAQ style question and answer model combined with a Google Map mashup.  What is innovative is the approach they have taken in presenting the questions and answers.  By geotargeting the questions and allowing multiple responses, Travellr is building an organic list of travel tips that is being categorized both by subject and destination.  This information would be an interesting addition to traditional travel sites as an adjunct to a destination guide.

I see an interesting opportunity for local destination operators, guides, and suppliers to join the site and become experts for their destinations.  Like most social sites, each member has a public profile that can be used to help market your expertise.

If you are interested in giving the site a try make sure to use the “t4blog” beta key when you sign up for your Travellr.com account.