2008-11-22

Battle of the Trip Planning Sites

The PhoCusWright 2008 Travel Innovation Summit was a showcase for two major types of websites. The first was Vacation Rentals, undoubtedly because of the recent PhoCusWright study about Vacation Rentals, and the second was trip planning. There were a number of trip planning tools represented at the show including:

This graph shows trends in popularity (according to Alexa.com) for Uptake.com, TripWolf.com, and TravelMuse.com.

TripWolf.com was not a participant in the Travel Innovation Summit, but they were at the PhoCusWright 2008 Conference. I included them in this comparison because it is interesting to me that both TripWolf.com and Uptake.com have a very similar growth pattern in their ranking and almost identical current Alexa rank given their start times were also almost the same. What I find intriguing is that Uptake.com is US only and TripWolf.com has a very strong Europe focus and they both aggregate destination data in totally different ways and yet they would appear to both be very successful (at least in traffic). Uptake uses search mechanisms to aggregate and pull together information in an automated and almost mechanical way wherease TripWolf.com uses user generated content and community contribution to aggregate reviews and unique content. Which model will win in the end? What do you think?

This post was originally posted by Stephen Joyce @ Travel & Tourism Technology Trends.
> Read the original post here