Whenever we talk about travel startups, trip planning is a segment which is often in question. It has emerged to be one of the favourite segments of startups and investors and yet, it is often frowned upon.

It isn’t often easy to tailor the product to how travellers go on about looking for transportation, lodging and activities. There are a lot of variables involved pushing up the challenges for entrepreneurs in this space. So last week, we invited people who are actually deep in this space to answer some of the questions and share the facts we may have missed. Chandrakant and Chirag from Routern joined us to share their experience and learnings from the journey so far and talk about the opportunities for growth. Here are the some of the highlights from the conversation:

The problem is real

Planning a trip is a complicated process for someone depending entirely on online tools. People have to go to multiple sources for various stages if they are not looking to book a package directly. Customisation is a major challenge and almost everyone in this space is exploring ways to simplify that in one way or the other. Exactly the reason so many entrepreneurs and investors are drawn to this space.

Challenge with fragmentation

One of the major challenge for planning startups is the fragmentation and low standardisation. There are far too many options at every stage and beyond flight bookings, a clear lack of standardisation drives customers to check multiple sources. Planning services have to work hard to build the trust, that what they are offering strikes the right balance between quality and value, which is a slow and tedious process.

Where is the money?

Making money on a planning platform isn’t an easy job as many experts have expressed on multiple occasions. Chandrakant highlights that the challenge is there because many such platforms are leaving exit spots for the users where they shouldn’t. The team at Routern is trying to deal with that by bringing all the required tools behind a single neat interface and letting the user book all at once. According to them, this has allowed them to get value out of each item on the itinerary rather than being just a fancy source of quality leads for OTAs.

Smarter metasearch maybe

Someone from the audience asked if planning platforms are trying to edge out metasearch platforms. That was a rather interesting point as most of the startups in planning space are working with booking platforms and directing the booking in exchange of a commission which sounds quite similar to meta. Our guests from Routern agreed to that but added that it is a rather smarter layer that they are adding which serves more purpose and adds more value for the user.

Consolidation will drive forward

We haven’t seen any players grow big enough in this segment yet. However, it is likely that things won’t continue to be the same for long. Companies with common vision will join forces and we will see similar trends as we are observing in the booking space right now.

Bridge to online

Offline travel bookings still continue to hold a larger share in the Indian travel market. This again comes back to trust people have on their preferred travel agent and the level of personalisation on offer. Chirag claims that platforms like Routern will serve as the bridge needed to get these travellers from booking with their trusted neighbourhood travel agent to booking online. As the users continue to experience better personalisation with the use of data and a wider array of options, the transition of accelerate.

We will be bringing you more conversations with startups in different industry segments over the coming months.

For more details about Routern, you can check the slides below or visit Routern.com.

The post Highlights from our conversation about trip planning space with the Routern team appeared first on TravHQ.

Google finally launched the much awaited travel app Google Trips. While at first glance, you might want to pass it off as yet another trip planning app, there is lot more to it. It offers a TripIt like planner coupled with a discovery service. Being a Google app, the interface is neat and experience seamless but that is not what makes it a good companion for your trips.

While of course Trips is available as a single travel app that you can download and use now, it isn’t all new. Google Now, the assistant found on Android devices, has been a very good companion on my trips. It already offers pretty much what an app like TripIt or Trip38 is used for. All the travel bookings are arranged and displayed with all the necessary details available at a glance. Also it shares recommendations when you visit a new destination and provides important information. However, the Google ecosystem means that OEMs often tuck in Google Now somewhere in favour of their own developments. Google Trips addresses that as anyone looking to have their trips neatly arranged in one place can just use the app. The bookings are pulled automatically from the confirmation mails and tickets sent to your mailbox should you allow it to do so.

The bits of data

Because Trips is specifically meant to be your travel companion, it can do all that Google now can do and a lot more. The recommendations are neatly organised to put together itineraries for you and that is where you start to realise how the plethora of services Google offers come into play. Google Maps generates heaps of data from the users. Look up a restaurant, tourist attraction, bar, amusement park or any place on Google and you will notice that it knows the popular times for those places from the user data. Check the ‘Timeline’ in Google Maps on your Android device and you will see what it knows about your daily commute and roadtrips. This data is put to good use in Google Trips.

The volume of visitors and their behaviour at any attraction helps it create itineraries. You can see the average time people spend at any particular attraction and how long they take to travel to the next one. The app features top 200 cities right now and all the data is based on historic visits by other travellers. If you don’t like what Google is suggesting under ‘Day plan’ or if you have some recommendations from your friends already, add them and the app will plan your day around it.

The freebies given away under Google Local Guides program have also contributed significantly to the Google Trips. The simple yes or no questions like “Is this place suitable for kids” or “Is this place good for quick bites” asked over months from the contributors have helped them categorise the places under various categories like ‘Indoor’, ‘Kid friendly’ and ‘Outdoor’ among others. You can simply choose to visit places from these lists or check what Google is recommending for you on the basis of your data. The places also include recommendations for food and beverages, because of course what is a good trip without local food.

And yes, you can save all the data offline so that you don’t have to bother about connectivity or roaming costs while travelling.

Is Trips the only travel app you will need?

Tough to say at this point. Right not it is really good to manage all your bookings and to discover places you should check out. However, in the hour or two we spent tinkering with the app, there were some obvious limitations visible.

Firstly, it allows you to pull data from just one Gmail account which would be a challenge for many. The tickets for my business trips are sent to me on my work email while all my other bookings are on my personal mail account. As I am using Trips with my personal account, the best option is to forward all the bookings there.

Another limitation is the lack of booking option at this point. It is very likely that Google will add the option in future but right now, all you can do is get to know about places, and then see how you can book.

Should trip planning startups be worried?

That could be a yes or no depending on your approach. Google Trips appears to be purely built on the data from Google Maps and user behaviour at this point. Which means it features only the popular and user rated places, whether we talk about destinations or the attractions at destinations. Travellers are always looking for new places to explore and that is where trip planning services backed by strong content have an upper hand. Google’s approach is still very macroscopic which leaves plenty of room for players with good local content and microscopic focus to thrive.

That said, Google will continue to add more to Trips which could result in David vs Goliath situation for some. They will also be launching the much awaited messaging app Allo which is likely to come with a Google AI bot built in to get things done. There is a possibility that the AI bot will be put to use in other apps as well (for travel booking here maybe) and might take away an advantage or two from the smaller rivals.

You can read the announcement on Google Blog here.

How do you think Google Trips will affect the trip planning startups? Do share with us.

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Trip Planning is considered to be a tough space to survive and often the experts would advise you to stay out of the space because of the challenges. You often have to pay a lot to acquire new customers and with the space getting highly competitive, the climb keeps getting steep. Joshua and Neti understand the challenges very well and despite that, they decided to dive into this space With Excursion because almost all the available options lacked the flexibility a traveller needs.

Joshua and Neti at the Songkron Festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Joshua Rau is an avid traveller and a solar energy engineer turned entrepreneur. Neil Pengkhuan, his companion in the entrepreneurial journey is a travel lover and coder from Thailand. Dissatisfied with the other travel planning apps, they decided to bring out Excursion. Many of the apps miss out on offline usability and are more biased towards selling activities and hotels but Excursion addresses these problems. According to Joshua, the highlight of Excursion is its flexibility. The app doesn’t force the users to stick to any specific method of planning. Users can find things to do from the Foursquare database or even add custom items from Google Places. This feature allows travellers to even add their AirBnB rentals to their plans and get local recommendations from their hosts. This makes it a planning app with local discovery built it.

Another highlight of the app is its social element. We often learn about new places from other travellers and add them to our list of places to travel. They have recently updated the app and the latest one allows users to share their plans with strangers or people you meet while travelling. They can send each other travel ideas for their next destination.

While Excursion hasn’t been around for very long, the app has already helped travellers in making thousands of trip plans. With these interesting new features added in the latest update, they are expecting the numbers to grow exponentially. The sharing feature will make it more relevant to travel bloggers and local experts who will then be able to leverage this as another channel to communicate with other travellers.

The app is available for iOS devices and the founders have got a long list of exciting ideas that they will be adding over the coming months. There is also an Android app in pipeline which will be coming out very soon. You can download the iOS app here or find more details on their website. They are pretty welcoming to interesting ideas so you can shoot your suggestions to info@excursion-app.com.

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You will find a dozen apps that will let you find and book activities in the region, another half a dozen to find local attractions, even more to find hotels and then some more to recommend restaurants and bars. Most of them find utility at some time or the other while you are travelling, but they take up a spot needlessly for most times. This is where Shouut enters the frame. It brings together local food, attractions, events, shopping, lodging and activities, all stitched together seamlessly in a single app.

The recommendations are divided in five different categories- food and drink, nightlife, shopping, leisure and outdoor and travel and stay. Under each category, you will find three parts- Find, Do and Get. Under ‘Find’ you can find places. Places to eat, places to stay and places to visit. As the name suggests, ‘Do’ features things that you can do near you. It includes events, concerts, plays and activities that you can be part of over the next few days. ‘Get’ includes the nearby deals that you might be interested in. Of course the ‘Find’, ‘Do’ and ‘Get’ hold different meanings for different categories.

While most such services rely on crowdsourcing recommendations and reviews from anyone who is willing to contribute, Shouut only allows specific content creators who already have good knowledge about the topic in question.

“We are building a trusted recommendations platform and for that we need to keep the quality of content high. I don’t think we will take the crowdsourcing route, at least not in the visible future” says Praveer, Founder of Shouut.

At times, the reviews on platforms like Zomato and TripAdvisor can be subjective and might not paint a very clear picture. The contributors on Shouut have blogs with moderate to high following, making them a credible source of information.

Praveer, Founder and CEO, Shouut

Being an avid traveller himself, Praveer would often travel to new destinations and then shuffle through multiple apps and websites to put together a plan on places to visit. That is why he came up with the idea of Shouut.

By default, the recommendations are sorted by distance which can be changed according to your preferences. The results include tags which can be used to filter. You can also choose to manually select the location if you want to see results for the places that you are planning to visit.

We have always emphasised that any travel app or service should be relevant to the travellers for most times to keep them engaged and this is where Shouut takes full points. When asked about the geographies covered, Praveer very confidently asked me to try and find a place in India, however small it may be, for which there aren’t any listings. I am yet to find one.

Apart from listing the upcoming events and activities hosted by others, they are also working with brands like Rolling Stone and Lonely Planet to co-curate activities. This will help them drive more users to the app. The app also uses Bluetooth low energy beacons to drive store level engagement when shopping. For this, they have partnered with major brands like UCB, Croma, Reliance and are constantly adding more to the list.

While Shouut came into existence only a few months back, the app already has more than 25,000 recommendations, over 1500 events and around 300 offers. Giant Tech Labs Pvt Ltd, the company that operates Shouut recently announced a seed funding of $500,000 from an individual angel investor. According to Praveer, these funds will be used in product development and going forward, they will continue to add interesting features to the app.

The app is definitely worth a try, whether you are looking for weekend activities in your city or things to do at a new destination. You can download the Android app or go to www.shouut.com to learn more about it.

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We get inspired to travel from our friends, from people who have explored and experienced. Most of the times, we come across some picture of a beautiful destination or notice the check in of a friend, we go to Google to look up more details, we try to see what all can be done at the destination, try to figure out the number of days required to explore, discuss the idea with some friends and then eventually put together an itinerary and start booking. Some people choose to use search phrases like ‘Turkey tour packages’ and book the first thing in sight but they aren’t really the travellers in question here.

The process from inspiration to experience could take anywhere from few days to a couple of months but it usually goes this way. After we travel, we share the experience over social platforms which will start the chain for someone else. But then the Facebook account isn’t a travel diary. Apart from the photographs and travel tales, there is a lot more content fighting for our attention and this is where TraveLibro enters the picture. Very neatly, it brings together travel and social in one place.

Monish Shah and Malhar Gala, Founders, TraveLibro

TraveLibro was started by Monish Shah, a travel aficionado and a former investment banker and Malhar Gala, a serial entrepreneur. The idea of starting TraveLibro germinated when Monish perceived a gap in travel market while researching destinations for his own honeymoon. The core team comprises of people from diverse backgrounds and the whole team is made up of over 50 individuals working to realise a common vision.

TraveLibro allows travellers to connect with their friends, fellow travellers and travel service providers. They can share their experiences, see where their friends have been travelling, look up details of destinations, find local attractions to explore and start putting together an itinerary. It offers a pre plan option where one can plan details of the trip in advance. And after this, it can also connect to the right agent who can put things in place for the trip.

One can simply sign up using Facebook or Twitter account and start using the platform. There are thousands of itineraries spread across various destinations all over that you can browse for inspiration. The itineraries are tagged in different categories like budget, business, religious, luxury and more making it easier to differentiate and find the right one. These itineraries are created by their team of travel experts, travel agents and other travellers.

However this isn’t the key highlight of TraveLibro. TraveLibro stands for ‘Travel Book’ and that is exactly what its mobile app doubles up as. The app offers an ‘On the go’ feature which creates a timeline of your trip when you are on the go. This way you can save your memories in a neat, organised manner without having to keep a separate record of bits. When you are travelling with friends, they can be tagged in the timeline and the end result will be a beautiful collaborative timeline that will let you revisit your destination once you are back.

While TraveLibro offers plenty for discovery and planning stage of travel, it misses out on the option to book. However Monish has assured us that while we are recording our trips on the app, the TraveLibro team is gearing up to introduce the booking feature. Expect the feature to be rolled out in the coming months. You can find more details about TraveLibro here. The app is available for iOS and Android.

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