If Travelmuse 'sucks' then there is probably not much hope for hundreds of others

A cracking row taking place in Silicon Valley where tech blogmeister Robert Scoble has slammed the start-ups performing at this year's DEMO conference in California.

Scoble says he visited the website of every one of the finalists and "boy, do they suck. Really, really suck".

Travelmuse is one of the sites under consideration at the event.

Now, let's be fair to Travelmuse for a moment. It's a pretty decent online travel agency. Has plenty of destination content, some handy trip planning functionality, flight, hotel, cruise, package, car hire search and booking engines, ties in some good 'inspiration' tools, and actually looks rather good and is easy to use.

In other words, Travelmuse is A Good Site.

But back to the title of this post, then:

What chances are there for countless other online travel businesses? Let's face it: there are hundreds of travel sites which probably don't come near the level of functionality and usablity of Travelmuse.

Luckily for them Scoble isn't a major investor in travel companies.

And thankfully for Travelmuse, it isn't called Tripmuse.com or something. It wouldn't want to be hit by the Curse of Trip.

UPDATE: Scoble wrote another post this morning 'Useful travel web sites', where he republished a list of suggestions his Twitter friends had put forward in response to a question for recommended sites. The usual suspects were all featured - Kayak, TripIt, Expedia, Mobissimo et al - and one other site: yes, step forward...Travelmuse, which nominated itself.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution


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