I had a travel planning startup for 5 years and I agree 100% with Tan's about that you have to re-acquire the user every 9 months and the main reason is that the user is unable to remember your "name". But imho the main problem on travel industry if you are doing a travel planner is not exactly that the user doesn't remember you... this happens at other industries: job finders, real state, consumer electronics...
The big problem in travel is competence. It makes user (re) acquisition REALLY expensive and probably, as a startup, you can't afford it (an this mixed with no actual retention is painful). And why is it so expensive: because you cant compete with advertising, SEM or even SEO with big players out there with a LTV that multiplies yours by 10x. And actually, do a better job than you when we are talking about user satisfaction.
Airlines, big online travel agencies are really good at this and pay for a) Long tail SEM, b) content for being top SEO. Remember, Online Travel Agencies are technology companies with big resources. They are extremely good at SEO, at loyalty, at landing page optimization, at design, at customer service... their life is on it.
Think about this scenario:
User searches at google for "traveling to Vienna" (or even "travel planning vienna").
You know two things about that user:
1) He wants to plan his trip to Vienna (75% true)
2) He is going to buy cheap tickets to Vienna (95% true).
Big OTAs or Airlines know this, and what they do? They fake they are travel planners doing better (expensive) SEO than you as they know that user is going to buy the ticket at their site (that's 2$ per visit revenue)... because they do that extremely good. If they fail noone cares: User wont remember and at least they had brand awareness for their plane tickets.
Anyway, i think the problem is much simpler and applies at every industry: if you don't have a great retention (and this can be something not under your control, e.g. because what you are selling is needed twice a year) you have to be really good at user acquisition. And being good at user acquisition at a not-niche sector is extremely hard, no matter how good your product is. Probably you will have to focus first on what's your hack on getting users instead of at having a good product. Sad but true.
I've been reviewing Alexa's top travel sites for years hoping something changes... and its pretty discouraging: only 1 of top 25 sites not a ticket-seller: Tripadvisor (2nd). 4 in top 50, and all of them are super seo sites.
Google has been punishing not content sites for years, even being the best solutions. We've seen a lot of amazing ajax tools for almost every problem we could figure out... but if they were not seo compatible, everyone forgets them. I hope this changes in the future, e.g. mobile apps have another search scenario.
I think if you could own the pre-trip organisation, and the post-trip sharing that would help cement it in the users mind. Most people dump the photos onto Facebook, but I imagine if there was a way to organise the data nicely or build a basic travelog from the trip data some people would be interested.
Interesting about the only non-ticket seller being Tripadvisor, I didn't realise it was that skewed toward trips sales.
Some of the problems in the article are what my startup has been dealing with for a while. We are basically trying to deal with the competence issue by letting people create travel logs of their adventures (both during and post trip)and use that to make customized travel suggestions for the future.
Users can basically share trips like the one below and we link up with most networks to import content from past trips. https://esplor.io/trips/k8g96my2j4vnm.
My friends in Mumbai, India are beta testing a beautiful travel journal Web app at http://serai.me/ (after a year of hard work) to share those beautiful trip photos with friends and they can contribute/comment so each can share his/her photos of the trip to a unified journal !
The pre-trip organisation bit is something We are working on as part of a long term goal of our new startup, Planning To (www.planning.to)
Being able to use the context of peoples existing plans and calendar/schedules to provide automated concierge type suggestions of what would suit them best in terms of travel (e.g flights, hotels etc)
Focused on B2B travel rather than vacations though for reasons others have put very well in here :)
To begin with though, we want to solve the problems inherent in calendaring/scheduling in the first place, and then build a technology platform from there that people can use to add context and automation to all sorts of use cases, travel being one of them.
Anyone interested in what we are doing would really appreciate feedback, good or bad :)
I know of one startup, Compathy(in Japan) that are working the other way around -that is, they're building a product that's first for post-trip sharing and then adding pre-trip planning elements/partnerships to it:
I think this is a good strategy since even a small population of traveling power-users who are keen on sharing their experiences can generate a lot of content and value for your site.
I've arrived at this conclusion in my mind regarding trip sharing or trip rating services - though for slightly different reasons.
Once someone creates a self-hosted, WordPress-like, trip sharing software, I'd be all over it. Like my blog, I'd like to know that my time spent writing and uploading photos is going to last longer than the typical lifespan of a startup.
Not wordpress, but currently building a digital travel journal in which you can share trips like this https://esplor.io/trips/k8g96my2j4vnm (press see timeline for the diary view)
Based on what you said, you seem like the user we would target. Any feedback would be brilliant!
I wonder if a travel-planning-app-as-a-service would work? Or maybe more as an affiliate system. I.e., you build a travel planning app and try to convince the OTAs (and the airlines, but I don't see how) to sign on as affiliates. Your travel planning software might have to be embedded in their site, I don't know. It might not be workable but it does dodge the user acquisition/retention problem.
It's more about the "how" than the "what". If you have a general idea about what you want to do the trip planners give you unbiased advice on how to do it and save you maybe 3 or 4 weekends of trip planning
The big problem in travel is competence. It makes user (re) acquisition REALLY expensive and probably, as a startup, you can't afford it (an this mixed with no actual retention is painful). And why is it so expensive: because you cant compete with advertising, SEM or even SEO with big players out there with a LTV that multiplies yours by 10x. And actually, do a better job than you when we are talking about user satisfaction.
Airlines, big online travel agencies are really good at this and pay for a) Long tail SEM, b) content for being top SEO. Remember, Online Travel Agencies are technology companies with big resources. They are extremely good at SEO, at loyalty, at landing page optimization, at design, at customer service... their life is on it.
Think about this scenario:
User searches at google for "traveling to Vienna" (or even "travel planning vienna"). You know two things about that user: 1) He wants to plan his trip to Vienna (75% true) 2) He is going to buy cheap tickets to Vienna (95% true).
Big OTAs or Airlines know this, and what they do? They fake they are travel planners doing better (expensive) SEO than you as they know that user is going to buy the ticket at their site (that's 2$ per visit revenue)... because they do that extremely good. If they fail noone cares: User wont remember and at least they had brand awareness for their plane tickets.
Anyway, i think the problem is much simpler and applies at every industry: if you don't have a great retention (and this can be something not under your control, e.g. because what you are selling is needed twice a year) you have to be really good at user acquisition. And being good at user acquisition at a not-niche sector is extremely hard, no matter how good your product is. Probably you will have to focus first on what's your hack on getting users instead of at having a good product. Sad but true.
I've been reviewing Alexa's top travel sites for years hoping something changes... and its pretty discouraging: only 1 of top 25 sites not a ticket-seller: Tripadvisor (2nd). 4 in top 50, and all of them are super seo sites.
Google has been punishing not content sites for years, even being the best solutions. We've seen a lot of amazing ajax tools for almost every problem we could figure out... but if they were not seo compatible, everyone forgets them. I hope this changes in the future, e.g. mobile apps have another search scenario.