RealTravel has come a long way since we first mentioned them in our Web 2.0 conference roundup last October. They now have very deep travel content - mostly written by users, and some from a recent partnership with Frommer’s. The site has an active community of tens of thousands of frequent travelers who talk about their experiences and freely give their recommendations via blogs, forums, photos, etc.
Tomorrow RealTravel will annouce its new My Trip Plan tool, which can be found in the main navigation area. Travel content on the site includes an “add to My Trip Plan” button. Clicking this basically cuts and pastes the information into the My Trip Plan area along with a link to the original content, and this information can then be shared with others for discussion.
TripHub and Yahoo, among others, also offer good trip planning tools. RealTravel’s new My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel’s active traveling and content-creating community.
All the content on RealTravel (except the Frommer’s Guide content) is drawn directly from user posts and photos that are categorized by location and type. Editors, with the help of some automated classification, and choose the cream of the crop to be featured on the site. Readers can also affect the ranking of posts by voting on them or implicity when they add the content to their trip plan. All this content populates the site’s info on trip ideas, photos, blogs, dining reviews, sight reviews, useful links, and hotel reviews.
The blogging platform performs like any other blog (RSS included) except you catagorize by location and type (if it’s a review or not) before you write up the entry. You can’t drop drop images directly in a post, but instead associate some photos with it via an image gallery. You can print these photos out later using Qoop. Readers can comment on posts or leave questions in RealTravel’s location specific forums.
RealTravel has accomplished all of this in just one year, and with only $1 million in angel funding. They are a poster-child for the way to run a lean web service, and I suspect a bigger round of financing, or acquisition, will come in the near future.
This is neat. I will be travelling to Africa next week and do want to set all that up (eventually by making my own *.kml for google earth). but I am interested. I’ll sign in right away!
Nick,
When you say this “RealTravel has accomplished all of this in just one year, and with only $1 million in angel funding. They are a poster-child for the way to run a lean web service, and I suspect a bigger round of financing, or acquisition, will come in the near future.”
I’d love to have my Google Dream materialize. I did once blog on it http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com.....hlist.html
Travel Tips for Frequent Flyers
http://www.miguelcarrasco.net/.....s_for.html
Web 2.0:For users by users.
They have a great site.
Web services that are user centered are and will become very successful.
Great for planning my coming vacation.
Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but Yahoo Travel seems to have a LOT of content including journals (aka blogs), user photos, expert photos, etc. As well as tens of millions of monthly users… am I missing something?
Tripadvisor and Lonelyplanet offer much deeper content.
Very good info, Thanks. One of our co-founders of http://www.VideoKarma.com lives in New Delhi, India and we are planning a trip there soon.. Keep up the good work, we read you everyday.. Cheers, Mike
Why does this site feel like such a rip off of http://www.travbuddy.com
…and not even as cool
maybe it is a good site
but it is too slow to open it
i am in China
Looks like a more professional version of wayn.com (Where Are They Now).
I like Travelpost better (www.travelpost.com)
This is off topic, but I get so many ideas when I read TechCrunch and this article is an example, thank you. You’re like drinking a shot, whereas business week (which always seems to spark that in me too) is more like having to down the whole beer.
Am I the only one that doesn’t use an online travel planner? I just chose the best deals from yahoo farechase and move on.
Amit, I don’t - but we’re a bootstrapping start up - the only travel these days is for business
but I do really like how there’s user driven content on there with more than likely tips and recommendations for when I actually do get to have fun travel.
Perfect combination between user content and editors choices from the web and other resource!
(Steven commenter 7, Lonely-planet guides are also included at real travel so how deep more could they be…?!
also you can combine lonely planet with this great new feature.
Yahoo travel and others mentioned here, do not really live much chance to small places, or small tips cause they can not sell you expensive hotels, ordered commission from them etc. so the important information from the street or the travel experiance never really arrives.
Mike
http://www.NiceFlatinRome.com
Yahoo! travel is a great service, but I saw RealTravel as being different. RealTravel has tighter categorization and integration than Yahoo!’s Travel Service, which keeps journals separated from reviews and most of the journal content in the trip plan section. RealTravel is a user generated guide, whereas Yahoo! focuses on user reviews of items in their database. As to the journals, Yahoo! doesn’t expose individual posts, but lets you to read entire journals instead.
TravBuddy looks cool. It seems to have more social features than RealTravel. Accoding to alexa it looks like they started around somewhat the same time, with RealTravel a little earlier.
Great site. I’m also a big fan of the grassrootsy-ness of http://www.EuroCheapo.com. They’ve been around forever.
Granted I dont have any users except myself and a few friends, but I built this in a couple months on a shoestring - http://www.braveorbit.com - for travelblogging. You can check out my blog at http://www.braventure.net/Simp.....thor=aaron
A year to develop with $1 million in angel funding? That’s lean?
Check out this alternative, built in the same timeframe with Zero funding whatsoever:
http://www.blogabond.com/
I prefer http://www.tripmates.com- it’s more of a social network than RealTravel. You can actually find people to meet up with on a trip- in addition to sharing travel content and asking one of their Trip Guru’s for tavel advice (which came in handy for my trip to Paris). They also have a cool group travel feature called Tripvite- like evite for group trips.
I think I still like Gusto! Grabber - they say they’re “the ultimate travel planning tool” - They have a demo which is pretty persuasive! It shows you how you can grab and collect travel info from around the web for your travel planning.
http://www.gusto.com/gusto_grabber
If you can read Chinese, there’s one similar site targeting the Chinese community: http://www.yododo.com/
Hi Nick,
I’ve used RealTravel in the past but I found it very slow, messy and not in sync with technology. (altough it was 7 months ago…) My friends introduced me to a different web site which actually does the same but includes really cool mapping features including dynamic route plan. During the 7 months I’ve been with them they manage to significantly increase their number of users and they don’t advertise as much. The site is: http://www.mylifeoftravel.com
It’s definitely a neat feature and realtravel seems to be a pretty good site, but I don’t really see what the huge deal is. To echo some of the other sentiments, they’re fairly similar to a lot of other sites out there, most of which have set up with nothing. 1 million dollars to set up is not lean, certainly not for this type of business and considering the technical side is not really that sophisticated….. What realtravel has been really good at though is promoting themselves. They must have a professional team in place spreading the word, probably even a larger team in this area than in terms of development. When they had only just started up, with features that dozens of other sites out there had been touting for years, articles started popping up all over the place by (obviously not very well researched and generally traditional media outlet journalists) about how great, innovative and useful the site was…. if they had looked a bit further than the press release in front of their nose they would have found a whole legion of sites doing this and similar things that deserved similar credit. It looks to me like they are just trying to maximize potential for a bigger buy out/investment round soon, much as Nick mentions. I have nothing against that and wish them all the best with that, but there are tons of other great sites out there that deserve the same attention!
Some of my personal favs are travelblog.org and travelpod.com, but the mylifeoftravel.com site mentioned by Sebastian also seems really good. Don’t get me wrong, realtravel.com is a good site and they do their niche well, but there’s no need for all the hot air…. then again, maybe that’s Web 2.0 defined
Sam Daams,
You just made a point. hehehehe
I have found Holiday IQ fairly informative. I often refer it for planning my vacations in Indian. Specially for deciding the place to stay , the reviews for various hotels & resorts by real travellers come in very handy. Hope you’ll also add it to you list of favourites.
sam Daams,You just made a point here.
I have found Holiday IQ very useful for planning my vacations in India. I often check their reviews on hotels & resorts before selecting the place to stay.