Monday, September 08, 2008

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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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr.Scoble is not amused..

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Thanks for your post, Kevin.

We've been on Twitter with Mr. Scoble a bit for the past couple of weeks and he's actually expressed a lot of enthusiasm for TravelMuse. So, we were quite surprised to read his DEMO diatribe.

I think what happened is that he didn't actually look at all the companies' sites before sending out his post.

In his defense, he actually said *almost* all the companies suck -- not "all"....

Still a pretty outrageous statement, but at least he didn't single out s specific company.

And the fact that he subsequently included TravelMuse in his list of favorite travel sites validated that he was actually pleased with it.

Many, many travel, tech and consumer press and analysts have given TravelMuse high praise. Being selected for DEMO is another strong endorsement we hope to do the industry proud here.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Hi Kevin (F)
Re "Being selected for DEMO is another strong endorsement we hope to do the industry proud here."

Can you confirm if this was as a result of you paying $18,500 for a slot?

Thanks. Alex

Anonymous said...

@ Alex

Are you interested to participate next year?

Guillaume

Anonymous said...

@ Guillaume

Not paying - no! (not that much!)

I was in discussions about doing the eyefortravel one.... but I think they were best suited for B2C sites rather than B2B systems.... besides - I would then have to outline my strategy.... and, er, then I would have to have one!

Anonymous said...

Quite useful information

Anonymous said...

Hi Kevin,

Have you had the chance to try out GoPlanit.com? We help generate your travel itinerary with one click and also provide mobile functionality so that you can access your itineraries, search for nearby things to do, and write about your trip using our travel microblogging.

Thanks,
Jimmy
COO, GoPlanit.com