In the digital age, there is no dearth of information for travellers looking at planning international trips. What is lacking, however, is travel experience, which makes them miss out on the true essence of any place they visit; the overall procedure of travelling in group tours is extremely fragmented.

This is where PickYourTrail steps in with its tailor-made international holidays and an aim to change the customer experience so they can explore destinations at their own pace. With a unique matching algorithm and price comparison engine that ensures that travellers build their itinerary completely suited to their tastes and at the best online prices, the platform is enabling people to plan their own vacation, in the way they want.

In conversation with co-founder Hari Ganapathy about their growth plans and upcoming travel trends in the industry.

1. You guys started in 2014 and in one of your earlier stories, you mentioned that you’d hit $25 million annual run rate by end of 2018. How is the progress towards that goal?

It’s definitely on track.

To go back a little, when the YourStory piece was published, we had just about launched our trip-planning algorithm with about seven countries. Today you could plan trips to over 250 cities worldwide – you could plan self-drive trips, honeymoons – completely online. We have tremendously improved our routing algorithm and our investments in machine learning are starting to pay off as well. We see up to 23% cost savings compared to our previous algorithms.

Coming back to growth, since 2014, we’ve been growing at a pace of 120+% YoY. 5000+ travellers and 60%+ repeat and referral customers along with the Google India-BCG stamp has set us up to continue our growth at the same pace, if not higher.

The PickYourTrail team at work.

2. The general industry perception has been that too many players are trying to solve the Trip Planning problem when the problem isn’t big enough. What is your take as a problem solver?

I agree, the trip-planning part is not a big problem at all. Information architecture/re-architecture cannot be a big market. That’s precisely the reason why we let customers not just plan, but also customise and eventually book on the platform. People hop 38 sites to plan their vacation and they are just not going to stop with the plan. They also want to experience the trip – and that’s where most trip-planning websites fail. They end up being affiliates where you have to out and book. Imagine a 12 night trip – you need to book 3-4 hotels. Ensuring all dates are right, checking hotel location, inclusions, entering credit card details multiple times; that’s not a great experience.

Given that the info side is quite well solved, we actually approached the problem from the other end – the fulfillment side. From supply checks, routing algorithm aimed at optimising cost, to ideal number of nights in a city, hotel-locations, ideal flying duration, we have written many lines of code that help travellers make the right choice. And the beauty is that, these are learning systems, so, as more and more travellers book with us, we are discovering newer routes, hacks, thanks to travellers. That is adding to the overall data set. Recently, we identified a route in Europe that saved almost Rs.27,000 in flights, thanks to a travel hacker who booked with us.

If you look at numbers, by 2021 MMT has projected that the overall India outbound market will be $20 billion and the online segment is $4billion. That’s the market we are going after to start with.

3. The e-commerce boom in recent years has seen the growth of many travel start-ups. How do you differentiate yourself from competition?

The single biggest difference between us and other travel tech startups is that we fulfill the trip through our inventory partnerships with Expedia, Amadeus, Viator, Priceline etc. There is enough info available online, so if you are going to be just an intelligent routing algorithm (which we are) it’s not going to suffice. That’s hygiene. Information about places is also hygiene. What is needed is for someone to reduce the choice overload. There is an interesting German proverb – Qual Der Wahl (the pain of choice). Our endeavour is to give the customers the best possible options with least possible effort. Because we also get booking data, we are able to understand various user cohorts and personalize hotels, transfers, flights and activities. And not just this, for customers who book with us, given we know their tastes, they get real time suggestions on things to do when they are in destination – which is a huge wow! The fact that we have an NPS score of 64 speaks volume about not just our computational expertise, but also our focus on customer happiness.

We give the traveller a sense of pride and personalization by helping them plan their own vacation, in the way they want without taking the fun out of trip planning. And once they book with us, our real time mobile concierge delivers unparalleled wow. We are in fact sprucing up our app to help customers book tickets and tours real time in destination.

4. You are essentially targeting the independent travellers who are looking at places abroad. How big is the outbound independent traveller market from Indian standpoint.

We define the independent traveller as someone who loves to explore destinations, wants to do just what his interests dictate and not that of the travel agents. This set of people could belong not necessarily free independent travellers, but also families and couples who want a non-packaged vacation, a trip that is to their pace and taste.

Currently, the number of travellers who are headed abroad from India is around 21 million. The leisure segment, is what we are catering to, and that is around 20% of the total outbound set. This is slated to go up to 50 million by 2020 – the market is only opening up! Also, the overall outbound market is close to $20 billion as per MMT estimates.

5. How has the revenue growth been so far?

We have been growing 100%+ year on year for the last three years. The beauty is that all of this growth has been bootstrapped. Our goal is to continue to grow at this pace in the coming years as well.

6. How did you get your first 100 customers?

When we pivoted from an activity marketplace to a personalized trip planner, the first 100 customers were totally organic, word-of-mouth customers. Even today nearly 60% of our customer base is through repeat-referral. We are looking beyond traditional marketing efforts to seek channels that give us quality leads. Given that we want to maintain a lean company, more than the quantity of traffic/leads what really matters is the quality of traffic. That’s where our focus on tech really helps us. We recently launched a sales intelligence tool in our in-house CRM and have seen an increase in conversion percentage of up to 27%.

7. If you had to pick one travel-trend for 2018 that would be

There are two trends that we are banking on and both are in the airline space. The first is the surge of international low cost carriers. This will enable Indians travel a lot more given their low cost. But will also only appeal to a certain set that’s ok with the no-frills model.
Full-cost carriers will connect more cities directly. One of the big problems is the lack of direct flight routes from India; you will see that changing. Jet recently introduced direct flights from Chennai to Paris. You will see a lot more of this happening and this will help boost traveller inflow significantly.

Last Minute Activities: A lot more Indians want flexibility in their plan and when they are assured of last minute seats to activities, it’s a win-win for both supply partners and consumers. The key would be to recommend things to do that suits their traveller profile.

8. Your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs in India who’re planning a travel startup?

Like every startup, a travel startup is hard. What makes it interesting is that it’s got super low barriers to entry. No real expertise or regulations around it, but has huge barriers to entry as you try and scale. That is why travel as a business is a great lifestyle business.

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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.

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Over the past two years, Trip Planning has turned out to be one of the favourite segments for travel startups. The process of putting together a trip is long and scattered for most travellers and innovators are working in their ways to simplify the same. Clearly it appears to be a major opportunity and yet, it is termed as one of the worst startup ideas. It is a space mostly dominated by upstarts with different scales with bigger players occasionally looking at the spaces left by their businesses.

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. In this upcoming webinar, we will talk about these challenges entrepreneurs taking a dive in this segment face. Chandrakant and Chirag from Routern will join us to share their experience and learnings from the journey so far and talk about the opportunities for growth.

Routern is a simple and easy to use platform which gives the user complete freedom while planning a trip without having to jump between multiple pages and websites. It features real time maps for visualisation and offers wide array of options for travellers to choose from.

Speakers

Chandrakant Sharma- He is the collaboration lead in the company who brings together the whole team to a single perspective for succeeding in shared goals. He also caters the clients in end-to-end travel solutions and delighting them. He has hosted international events and corporate conferences for 3 years now. As an avid traveler he goes out for trekking and exploring new places whenever an opportune moment comes.

Chirag Malik- From a culinary arts specialist to a Chief Marketing Officer, Chirag Malik is one of the founding members of Routern.com. His experience ranges from being a gourmet chef having worked with some of the most luxurious hotels of New Delhi to organizing the most swanky events across the city and outside.

Join us for the free webinar on Friday, December 23, 2016 at 03:00 PM IST (9:30 AM GMT). Follow the link below to register for the webinar.

Registration link

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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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Trips are always door-to-door. Since almost nobody has an airport or a major train station directly in front on their house, any such door-to-door journey has to involve multiple transport means, it needs to be multi-modal. Traditionally, planning and undertaking such door-to-door journey has been a complicated, exhausting endeavour.

This is about to change! Thanks to recent advances in journey planning technology (powered by AI), door-to-door journey planning is now possible in regions like India, where there are no central authorities to manage information about the public transport options. DistancesBetween has launched a beta version of a door-to-door planner and it is bringing seamless door-to-door travel to India.

Perhaps even more importantly, door-to-door intermodal journey planning enables for the traveller to move from planning individual legs of the trip to planning and booking the end-to-end trip easily. Goes without saying that it not only saves time and effort but also offers cost advantages.

The problem it addresses is much bigger than it appears at first glance. You know your options when you are travelling along a familiar route but the questions start to stack up when you are looking to travel to a new destination. The urban transportation options are many and if you add travel costs and time into the equation, there are just too many factors to account for to find the best optimised route instantly. For instance, it is possible that for shorter routes, a combination of train+auto would be both cost and time effective when compared to cab+flight as airports are usually located away from city centre and require longer transfer times. DistancesBetween accounts for these factors while serving you your options so that you are able to discover the best route for your journey and have a more accurate estimate of your journey time which would allow you to plan your day ahead accordingly. On top of that, the ability to book right there means that you don’t have to switch back and forth between different booking services while aligning the bookings with each other.

The founders bring immense industry and startup experience with them. Bharat Malik heads the team and he was a member of the founding team at Yatra. Sachin Mathur handles the technology behind the product and SatyaVeer Singh spearheads the marketing efforts.

DistancesBetween doesn’t rely on pre-set combinations. Instead, it uses AI so that it can offer a solution for even the most complicated of routes and it keeps on improving with time. The product is still in beta and the system continues to learn as more users discover and fine tune their routes. Behind it is a team of data researchers and some of the best brains researching on Multi Modal transportation systems.

There are some tools like Goeuro or Rome2Rio that are similar to DistancesBetween in what they offer. However, most of them are available for other countries and can’t be implemented in a region like India where the unpredictability associated with urban transportation is extremely high.

DistancesBetween is one of its kind tool in India and its relevance in the market is highlighted by the fact that 2.5 Million travellers have used the platform to discover and plan their trip since June 2016 when the team launched the product. Bharat shares that they have started booking facility in association with Yatra. The flight data is pulled real-time to include prices and travel time so that the results are as accurate as they can be. Similarly, the train data includes availability status so that tapping on the book button doesn’t end into disappointment.

He also shares that the beta we see at this moment is only a fraction of what is in pipeline. To make the user experience absolutely seamless, they are working on a mobile version. This would allow them to integrate some mobile first services like location based points of interest, hotels, emergency services, real time schedules and services like Jugnoo for Auto rickshaws or Uber for cabs. Another addition that we will see in near future is intuitive alerts and notifications that would assist in re-planning on the go.

DistancesBetween, with its strong technological solution, is a part of the Amadeus Next community. You can try planning your next trip on their website DistancesBetween.com or maybe just take it for a spin and see if it serves any travel options better than the ones you would have picked. And if you face any challenges, the team is readily available on chat right there to help you out.

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Travel is changing and it is changing fast. Just over the past few years, we have come a long way. From booking with our friendly cab provider in advance to calling an Uber to go to airport, from walking into a hotel hoping for rooms to booking at last minute using an app, from queuing up at airport to using mobile for check-in, things are changing rapidly and we have adopted the changes very well despite some initial reluctance.

Now a startup is trying to change another travel habit of ours. Most of us go on a trip, enjoy the experience and a few weeks later, pretty much forget everything barring the fact that we had fun. We share the stories with our friends and colleagues but the details are lost in Google searching the name of that one place which we really loved during the trip. Some travellers like me use an app like Color Note to save the details while on the go but that is a rather clumsy way of doing things.

Many apps allow you to avoid either of the two approaches and give you the option to feed in your trip details once you are back. While the idea is good, most people would choose to filter and edit photos for their Instagram instead of uploading all the details on a new platform. Why? Because we need gratification and that comes from friends on social networks. TraveLibro takes a clever approach here and smartly eliminates the need of keying in the details after the trip. Instead, it keeps recording your trip when you are travelling while adding an element of social media into the equation.

Former investment banker Monish Shah perceived a gap in the market while researching destinations for his own honeymoon and joined hands with serial entrepreneur Malhar Gala to build TraveLibro.

‘Libro’ is a Spanish word that translates to ‘book’, only in this case, the book writes itself and is ready for you and your friends to cherish right after the trip. While the feature can be used to record your solo adventures, it can accommodate your friends as well while on the go. As you travel with your friends, it will make a collaborative timeline which will be shared until you are travelling together and record separately when you decide to leave the lazy one at the hotel. Each one of the travellers can contribute to the timeline with photos they shoot at the destination. And with all your trips, you can also showcase a list of countries you have visited and the ones that are on your list. Doesn’t hurt to brag a bit, does it?

The recorded trips can be shared with friends and family who want to know about your journey. This is much easier and more detailed than the scattered photos shared on social media or dumped into a folder to be filtered later.

What works as a travel diary for you, works as a trip planner for someone else in your network. The recorded trips can be used by others to serve as the base plan for building upon by someone else. Whenever I plan to travel, I call my friends who have been in that direction to share whatever they remember of their itinerary and then I fine tune the plan. TraveLibro tries to do that only, albeit in a simpler manner. However, you can’t always count on your friends to make a sensible plan or even have one to share in the first place. That is why it also features a good number of reference itineraries created by experts for you to build upon.

The first time we came to know about TraveLibro, we were slightly disappointed to not find the direct booking option. It always had the option to send an enquiry to one of the many travel agents on the platform but many of us prefer to make individual bookings. Now they have integrated with multiple partners like flight metasearch Skyscanner or activity booking platform Viator to facilitate direct bookings from the website. A partership with Agoda is also in pipeline for hotel booking. This new development could possibly make it a strong player in this highly competitive space and with a large number of popular and not-so-popular destinations covered, it is likely to hold relevance for most of your trips.

Another reason we are so interested in TraveLibro is because it could serve as a new channel for travel bloggers. There are many platforms the bloggers use to engage with their audience and TraveLibro, with the strong focus on being a travel social network, could give them another way to do so. In fact, some of the top travel bloggers like Paul Johnson from ‘A luxury travel blog’, Bruised Passports and Nisha Jha are already using the platform to record their trips and share with their community. They often receive queries from travellers about places to visit or restaurants to try. Travellers can read about the experiences in detail on the blogs and browse through the detailed itinerary on TraveLibro. It would be interesting to see how going forward, we see more people explore the possibilities with this platform.

Website | iOS App | Android App

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Over the past few months, the startup ecosystem has witnessed a slowdown in funding and the story is being replicated in travel industry as well. A significant mismatch between the claims in pitch deck and results in quarterly reports has forced the investors to go on the defensive and be overcautious while investing in young startups. Investors are now looking at sustainable businesses that can show a quicker path to profitability. This has resulted in startups looking for ways to cut down costs, lower the growth momentum and even pivot into more frugal models.

This slowdown in funding has led to the shift of Holidify’s co-founder Kovid Kapoor from the startup to Saavn, the company that provides music streaming services. Holidify is a destination discovery platform that allows travellers to find destinations and book their trips. The news comes only a few weeks after the other co-founder, Rohit Shroff left the startup to join Girnar Software Pvt Ltd, the parent company of automobile portal CarDekho.com. Holidify was trying to restructure its operations after Rohit’s exit.

As a news report suggests, Kapoor has denied commenting on the reasons behind leaving the company however earlier Shroff commented on the funding drying up in travel space and the challenge faced by Holidify in raising fresh funds. Started in 2014, Holidify raised USD 100K in funding from multiple investors less than six months back. They founders were also in talks with few VC firms to raise a bigger round following the investment.

Both the co-founders will remain only as advisors to the company and all the future decisions related to Holidify will be taken by the investors. One of the investors has shared that they are working out things and it will take around 2-3 months before the company gets back on the right track.

Holidify was on a steep uphill climb as the space is highly competitive and there are multiple online and offline players that would allow travellers to book their trips. Even with the differentiators, the battle is to offer something unique to the customer and turn them into paying customers. However the bigger question here is if this slowdown in funding will result in the stronger players dominating the scene?

Source: VCCircle

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Whenever we come back from a trip, we like to tell our friends about it, about places that are worth visiting or activities worth trying out. While some choose to create photo albums or to write detailed blog posts, others often fail to document their trips properly. Every traveller in the group has got dozens of photographs but they get dumped in some folders and often never documented properly. Few weeks later people are left with scattered photographs and vague details of the trip.

This problem has caught the attention of various travel start-ups and they are trying to address it in different ways. Only a very small fraction of photographs are shared on social media and that too without the story. TripLived is a start-up that takes its own angle at this problem and enables travellers to automatically record their travel stories including elements according to their taste. The story is ready within minutes without requiring much intervention from the traveller.

People can choose to add their friends and family members in their trips and the recorded story can be used by the travellers to revisit their memories. The stories, placed across different categories like Adventure, Beach, and Family etc. are also available for others to view through the app so that they can take inspiration for their own trips. The events are neatly organised in a chronological order following the sequence of events as they happened along with photos.

The founders Mayank, Ayan, Santosh and Shadman come from the leading educational institutions and have experience of working with some of the major travel brands and building consumer mobile apps. This experience translates into a mobile app that left good initial impressions despite being relatively new. The app is available only on Android for now and while working on an app for iOS, they are also preparing the app to be used offline.

Before the launch in December 2015, they tested the beta for around a month. Currently they claim to have around 2000 users on the app. Talking about the differentiators from other similar services, the team points out that a large number of them are relevant when the trip is finished. TripLived however comes into play during the trip without much intervention from the travellers. Also it puts together the trip into a short video which carries all the essential elements.

Going forward, they will try to make the app more engaging for the users. As their user base grows, there will be more trips recorded on the app which would translate into people using the app before their trip during the planning stage than just during the trip. The app allows its users to follow other users and we think travel bloggers might find this particular feature interesting. They have got large communities of followers who like to learn about their travels and the app would simplify that.

You can try out the TripLived app for your Android device to plan and record your next adventure. An iOS version will be coming out soon.

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Google recently launched its new feature, ‘Destinations’, which claims to help users search and plan their vacation more easily. As you enter the destination or a region, you can see cards of suggested locations in the region, suggested itineraries and can even choose your interest and get relevant results. With this feature, Google has promised all the mobile users a smooth experience of travel planning. So, even if you enter a tentative period of your travel, it will return itinerary ideas and the best time to visit when fares are low. It will do the searching and scanning through billions of flights and hotels and return results according to your needs and budget.

Image: Google Blog

There are numerous travel planning apps that are well known and have been around for a while now. Let’s take a look at some of the features of Destinations as compared to other trip planning apps:

• To use Destinations you don’t need to download any app on your phone to plan your trip. Simply go to Google search bar and type ‘XYZ destinations’ and you’ll get cards that will return places of your interest. But you can also do all the searching and planning on websites of numerous other planning apps as well without downloading the app.
• There are suggested itineraries by Google but it does not provide any feature to save your itinerary or even create one. Whereas on apps like TripHobo you can get suggested itineraries or create your personalised itinerary and even save and share it with others in the form of a user generated itinerary.
• Destinations provides filters which help you narrow your search on the basis of your tentative dates, budget or interests. This seems to be quite an appealing feature but as of now it isn’t fully functional.
• Many travel apps provide booking solutions as well whereas Destinations return sites where you can go and book your flights.

Impact on trip planning startups?

So how can Google’s new Destination finder impact apps that provide similar features? By providing the convenience to simply Google any search for travel planning without going to any website or app, the company says it wants people to do all the searching and planning on their smartphones. But this leads us to think, why anybody would spend time to check Destinations on Google if they have to hop on to other websites to create their personalised itineraries and save them which they cannot do on Google!

With its search capabilities and ability of its algorithms to provide results based on consumer habits and preferences, suppliers like airlines, hotels and destination marketers are still looking forward to collaborate with Google but for now, the search giant is not providing any booking solutions and it returns booking portals as search results to make the final bookings because neither does Google wants to forsake ad revenue coming from these OTAs, nor do the OTAs want to snap ties with Google because it generates and brings huge traffic for their businesses. Also, there are snags in Destinations that need to be fixed, so it’s not a be all and end all for all the travel planning needs as compared to other players providing similar solutions to travellers.

Author: TravelCarma is an experienced Travel Technology brand with expertise in equipping Travel businesses worldwide with state-of-the-art, mobile enabled Online Reservation Systems, Back-Office and Mid-Office Systems, Corporate Booking Tools and Access to Global Inventory via XML API Integrations. TravelCarma caters to over 200 Travel and Hospitality companies worldwide, including OTAs, Tour Operators, DMCs, Hotels, Wholesalers, Rental Car Companies and Bus Operators. You can know more about them at www.travelcarma.com and reach them at sales@TravelCarma.com.

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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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