Online Travel Industry

In recent years a flood of Internet-based companies have been formed to address the difficult tasks of travel research and planning. While the Internet has been used very effectively for quite some time for booking flights and hotels and finding places to dine, it has been quite tedious trying to research online where to go and what to do when you get to your destination.

This flood of start-up companies is trying to make this task a lot easier, causing some of the old players, like Yahoo! Travel and TripAdvisor, to improve their services as well.

The Trip Planning field is quite confusing. There are at least 100 companies that define themselves as Trip Planning solutions, but some of them are so different from the others that it is difficult to view them as competitors. The main source of confusion is that while some Trip Planning companies, such as TripWiser and Yahoo! Travel, try to provide solutions for at least six different use cases, others, like MapVivo, provide a solution for just a single use case. Classifying Trip Planning companies according to the use case that they are attempting to solve brings forward the similarities between the websites that are in the same classification. Each company can be classified multiple times if it solves more than one use case

In Rivalyzer we've identified the following six main use cases:

Travel Inspiration

When the user wants to go on vacation but is not sure where he should go, a website may…

Provide the user with an algorithm to choose the best destination for him. Examples for such sites are Triporati, TripBase and HappyTellUs.
Inspire the user with a special event or festival. Sometimes the best travel experiences are associated with a special event or a festival in the destination. Joobili is an example of a company that made a whole inspiration concept around events and festivals.
Provide the user with a list of top destination based on a theme he selects. Examples of websites that offer this capability include RealTravel and TripAdvisor.
Inspire the user with trips designed by other people. Examples of this approach can be found in many websites including Tripwiser and Mapvivo.
Inspire the user with places visited by his friends or virtual friends.

Plan a visit to a Single Destination

Find Things to Do, Places to Stay, Where to Eat – After the user has already selected the destination she is going to visit, she will want to research and plan what to do while she is there, where she will stay and where the best places to eat are.
There are numerous websites that focus on this use case. We'll mention just a few that excel in it: HomeandAbroad, NileGuide and GoPlanIt.

Route Planning

While most travelers visit only a handful of destinations on a single trip, others visit multiple destinations along a route or in a star format using a car, public transportation or other modes of transportation. The needs of this group of travelers are significantly different than of those that visit just one destination, and, while websites like NileGuide may be excellent for the “Single Destination” travelers, they provide very little help for the “Wandering Travelers". Some examples of websites with solutions for this use case are TripWiser, tripwolf and Yahoo! Travel.

Trip Journal

After the trip or even during the trip, many people want to share their experiences with their friends or create a memento of the trip for themselves. A perfect solution for them may be to record the trip route and to incorporate their stories and photos into it. There are numerous websites providing an offering for solving this use case, including MapVivo, Yahoo! Travel and TravellersPoint.

Social Networking

Many Trip Planning websites integrate complimentary social networking capabilities as a means to gain traffic, gain user loyalty and as another source for information. A travel-related social networking scores over a general social networking because it allows the user to…

Join a community of like-minded people.
Discuss travel – it is always fun.
Find local people.
Find travelers that travel to the same place at the same time each year with whom he can hook up.
Find people who have been to a destination and who can provide honest traveler-to-traveler advice.

Most of the Trip Planning websites have some form of social networking. A few include TravBuddy, WAYN and trivago.

Quick Answers

Some users don't come to a Trip Planning website to plan their whole trip but rather to find an answer to a specific question (such as "Which museum is open in Paris on Tuesday at 5:00 PM?," or "What is the nicest garden in Madrid?"). While this use case is supported by almost all of the Trip Planning websites, some specialize in it (for example: Dopplr and Localyte).

For each one of these use cases, Rivalyzer includes the list of features and capabilities that support it, as well as the list of websites that made an attempt to address it. Additionally, it includes reviews for the solutions that the different websites provide for these use cases.

Focus on Trip Planning

The first industry Rivalyzer performed competitive analysis on is the Online Travel Industry.

Our current focus is the Trip Planning space (Inspiration, Destinations, Sites and Attractions).

We are planning to cover some additional markets of the Online Travel Industry in the foreseeable future.

These markets include:

OTAs
Online Dining Guides
Meta-Search engines