Disclaimer: I run mygola.com, a travel planning startup where you get your own personal guide who does all the research & bookings for you.
fwiw, there's quite a bit I would agree with David on, particularly around how limited the use case for pure social travel is. But let me go a step further.
I'll claim that we've been led to believe that the hard part about travel planning is what to see and where to stay. I think there's plenty of room for improvement there too, but increasingly on the margins. Instead, the hard part is:
1. All the logistical glue in between (how do I get from the airport to my hotel? should I take a stroller with me to Zurich or can I rent one?). This sounds like something Mozio is working on
2. All the time-sensitive stuff (what's the best place for jazz in Paris on Oct 17th that's not ridiculously far from from my hotel? any genuinely good car rental deals for my dates?). Good luck with your friends helping you on that
3. Hyper-personalization (wife hates museums, loves outdoors + I have a conference near Union Square and only 6hrs on Sunday we can roam around, what's an "authentic" place to hang out?)
And the biggest of them all - a service that can guarantee that you'll receive high quality responses to all of these (whether using your friends' graph or foursquare tips, Mozio or whatever behind the scenes), regardless of what trip you're taking.
Each of these pieces individually might not be difficult but taken together, seemingly impossible for a single company to answer. That's why most services won't even let you express your trip needs like a human - they'd rather say "you better choose from our dropdowns and go around pushing filters until we'll deign to respond with dubious accuracy to a tiny part of your overall problem".
At mygola, we're trying to take on the whole beast of travel planning in what would appear to be a completely high touch and hence ridiculously unscalable way. But we've invested a bunch in making this scalable, and I think we're beginning to get there after almost 2yrs of effort.
A big reason why we're even beginning to crack it is because we TOTALLY rely on innovation coming from startups & big companies alike - using Oyster for 3-star+ hotel recommendations, Trustyou for hotel review analytics and Room77 to recommend the best room - but the whole sausage-making operation is invisible to the traveler. As it should be. So more power to the awesome tech innovators here!
fwiw, there's quite a bit I would agree with David on, particularly around how limited the use case for pure social travel is. But let me go a step further.
I'll claim that we've been led to believe that the hard part about travel planning is what to see and where to stay. I think there's plenty of room for improvement there too, but increasingly on the margins. Instead, the hard part is:
1. All the logistical glue in between (how do I get from the airport to my hotel? should I take a stroller with me to Zurich or can I rent one?). This sounds like something Mozio is working on
2. All the time-sensitive stuff (what's the best place for jazz in Paris on Oct 17th that's not ridiculously far from from my hotel? any genuinely good car rental deals for my dates?). Good luck with your friends helping you on that
3. Hyper-personalization (wife hates museums, loves outdoors + I have a conference near Union Square and only 6hrs on Sunday we can roam around, what's an "authentic" place to hang out?)
And the biggest of them all - a service that can guarantee that you'll receive high quality responses to all of these (whether using your friends' graph or foursquare tips, Mozio or whatever behind the scenes), regardless of what trip you're taking.
Each of these pieces individually might not be difficult but taken together, seemingly impossible for a single company to answer. That's why most services won't even let you express your trip needs like a human - they'd rather say "you better choose from our dropdowns and go around pushing filters until we'll deign to respond with dubious accuracy to a tiny part of your overall problem".
At mygola, we're trying to take on the whole beast of travel planning in what would appear to be a completely high touch and hence ridiculously unscalable way. But we've invested a bunch in making this scalable, and I think we're beginning to get there after almost 2yrs of effort.
A big reason why we're even beginning to crack it is because we TOTALLY rely on innovation coming from startups & big companies alike - using Oyster for 3-star+ hotel recommendations, Trustyou for hotel review analytics and Room77 to recommend the best room - but the whole sausage-making operation is invisible to the traveler. As it should be. So more power to the awesome tech innovators here!