15 travel itinerary saving / sharing websites reviewed

One theme that is beginning to become more prevalent is “itinerary saving” and “itinerary sharing”.

Overview
Say for example you are going on a trip to New York – you may want to save information about your hotel, the shops you want to visit, the attractions you want to see, the restaurants you want to eat at etc. This itinerary will need to be saved somewhere – and then shared with other members of the trip (family, friends etc) – who will comment on the proposed trip – and maybe even add their own components. At the moment much of this process is undertaken by consumers manually in “freetext” using email etc.

In the new world these itineraries can be placed online – and destination experts (or just people who have travelled there before – or local inhabitants) can comment on the proposed trip – and suggest alterations. Additionally travellers unknown to the initial traveller can take a proposed itinerary and use it as a basis of their own trip to New York.  

In the new world the travel website should be clever enough (and informed enough) to know that when you add a visit to the zoo on a Monday that it is closed on a Monday. Additionally, the proposed itinerary should be able to “price itself” or be manually sent to a travel agent / tour operator for review / pricing.

Feature | Product | Company
When gauging a new website proposal or idea you can categorise into 3 main types….. is this idea “big” enough to support a company? Is it “big” enough to be a product alongside other products within an existing company? Or is it just a feature to add to an existing website?

What we can see is that out of the 15 itinerary saving / itinerary sharing websites below……. some are features, some are products, some are standalone companies. This is unlikely to be sustainable.

Company

Tripology –  Add an itinerary (flight, cruise, hotel, car hire, activities) and have your itinerary sent to upto 3 travel agents for review / pricing. Free for consumer use. Travel agents pay $1 to $10 USD per lead. Not quite an itinerary sharing website (more an itinerary lead generating site) – but worth looking at in the same context as “wisdom of crowds” based tools.

TripWiser – Add, share and review trip itineraries. They also have a FaceBook application which has been getting some good press recently. One to watch…… Very web2.0

TripIt – Primary feature is that it organises your trips by taking your confirmation emails from leading travel websites – and automatically generates an itinerary from them in one central location. No public social features (yet!) – but you can invite friends (via email) to review your trip. Has a nice demo screencast

TripTie - Add, share and review trip itineraries. Includes photos and tagging. Their USP is a browser tool bar (that they have called MarcoPolo) where you can collect trip items as you browse around the web conducting your travel research.

TripHub – Add, share and review trip itineraries. Assists with group travel – as you can put up a proposed trip – and invite your friends to join you. Their acceptance status (yes, no, maybe) is recorded within the site.

home & abroad –  Add, review and share itineraries.

Product

RoughGuides – InTouchOnline – Are we allowed to talk about software anymore? Build your itinerary on your laptop – and take your laptop with you. Not curently for sale – but interesting concept (now out of date)

TourGuideMike –  For $20 USD you can buy access to a web based planning tool for Walt Disney World (Florida). This is a sensible product from Mike Hewell – who also runs private tours via a separate website. What Mike has done is make his destination experience as a tour guide available to many consumers…. and the functionality of the itinerary system will be tuned fully around the needs of planning a trip to Walt Disney World. This therefore will be much better functionality than a generic system devised for any kind of trip. There is no sharing involved – this is a personal trip planner. Worth a look – but I wish his website was less like those websites you get trying to sell you ebooks – as it just feels too “spammy”. (not something us Brits like on a website)

Feature 

Orlando – The convention and visitors bureau / tourist board website for Orlando, Florida. Click on “my trip planner” at the top of the page. This is a flex based application for adding events, experiences, hotels and attractions to a trip itinerary. No social features. Very “beta” (has a few browser bugs) – but this shows that destination websites will soon be adding this kind of feature very soon.

TravelGator – A trip planning website with built in itinerary creation, review and sharing. They have a video that shows how it works. Much more besides their itinerary system such as blogs – and a really neat little “slider” tool (on their homepage) for finding attractions

Iloho -  A travel planning website with reviews, photos and travel news. The itinerary system enables you to, in fairly straightforward freetext, upload an itinerary (and have your route put on a Google map). Users can vote, Digg style, for your itinerary.

UnearthTravel – Very nice itinerary map and mechanism, via the map, to add new places to an itinerary. More about places than experiences. Not quite finished but worth a look.

Yahoo Travel trip planner – Add, share and review trip itineraries. One of the first “large user” websites taking first steps with itinerary planning tools. Its a pretty average proposition – but cleanly designed and is a mainstream proposition (rather than for web wizards)

YellowstonePark – Am I allowed to keep saying that this is one of my favourite destination travel websites? They have a trip builder / trip itinerary tool as well. Not sure that it is fully “social” – but it shows that many more destination websites in the future will carry destination specific trip building tools.

Limereef – Add your itineraries. If small travel websites are adding itinerary tools – you should be too.

The long term for this functionality
I do not believe that this functionality can support companies as a standalone entity – not in B2C. At the very most it could be a product, as in the TourGuideMike.com example (where a product actually makes sense). In the medium term more and more suppliers will be looking to add similar functionality to their own websites. This functionality will become common and the differentiation will be in how a supplier’s knowledge is integrated into the tool (such as the zoo being closed on a Monday that I mentioned earlier). (This is why the generic trip building systems will suffer – because they don’t have that knowledge)

The opportunity for those who have created companies in this space – but who are going after the B2C market – is that they should consider rearchitecting their systems and move towards offering “unbranded” white label solutions to supplier websites (like tour operators and destination marketing websites)….. I expect the takeup would be massive. However it is more fun looking for consumer gold than selling tools to the trade….. so I doubt they will do this.

Tripology have a revenue model that could make sense though as a standalone entity – although they need to extend their “love” to tour operators as well as travel agents. They are also not going the “wisdom of crowds” route – but are working on expert review instead.

Finally
I am sure there are more out there that I have missed. Please add yours below:

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