NileGuide, a one-stop travel planning site, is rolling out several new features to its travel booking and planning portal. You can see our original review of the site here. NileGuide has re-designed the site with a sleek interface, a few more bells and whistles, added more geographic coverage areas, and created several trip planning tools to enhance the planning process.
The layout and general concept of the site has remained the same but Nile Guide has added more graphic imagery and high quality photos of destinations to add to the aesthetics of the site. It has also added 20 more destinations, so that it now includes customized, in-depth information for 100 destinations worldwide. Like the original version of the site, NileGuide aggregates information about destinations from over 10 sources, including Citysearch, OpenTable, Priceline, and Expedia, as well as adding its reviews from local experts who are familiar with the area. Now NileGuide has “suggested itineraries” for each destination. With all of this information, NileGuide has created neighborhood guides for various neighborhoods within each destination (much like CitySearch does). The site has interactive maps with the top destinations in each neighborhood. With NileGuide’s search filters, you can easily choose the right spot for any occasion, with options such as “price,” “kid-friendly,” hip,” and “upscale.”
NileGuide has also added a search widget comparison tool that lets you search and compare prices for both flights and cars via Priceline, Kayak, Hotwire, and Orbitz. The hotel search feature now injects real-time pricing availability powered by Priceline’s API. NileGuide lets you book your hotel directly through its site and offers comparison prices from Expedia.
Each selection, whether it be hotel, flight, restaurant, event, or bar can be dragged and dropped into the virtual itinerary, which at the end of the trip planning process can be converted into a handy PDF file (that can be emailed or printed), complete with all the necessary information, pictures and maps.
As we said in our original post on NileGuide, the site wants to be way more than a travel planning site and this makeover reinforces this ambition. The consumer and expert reviews combined with the ability to book flights and cars truly make it more of a one-stop-shop than its previous version. The travel search, planning and booking space is chock full of sites doing similar things—TripAdvisor also helps create itineraries but NileGuide’s new features and search capabilities go further. Zicasso and Offbeat Guides and TripWolf also assist consumers in the online travel planning process. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $9.5 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.
Congrats to the NileGuide Team!
Leena, your posts often read like press releases – can we get less hype and more insight, please?
I disagree. I actually prefer the way she reports – offering the facts along with the various possible angles and allowing us to make up our own minds.
After all the twitter/facebook homages, Leena’s posts are actually refreshing.
Do we really need another travel website to rate hotels & book trips??
Who’s funding this garbage? No wonder VCs raise less and less money and fewer and fewer companies go public.
Hopefully, they can sell it to Microsoft or Google or Priceline…
Last line of the post let’s you know who’s funding it…”Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $9.5 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital. “
Wow, way to be super naive. I’d like to point out that when google came around most thought the search engine market was already over saturated. There are always ways to do it better especially with the rate of new technology. But hey, if everything is perfect for you in your little bubble of a world than great. Personally I like to see new and better innovations. The internet is a dangerous place with ingrates like you around as you can pass your uninformed opinions around like an STD at a frat party.
how much does it cost to get a press release like this on techcrunch? pls let me know, thx
I used this site for a wine-tasting trip with friends last month – everyone added their favorite wineries to the itinerary and the site generated a map for us to print for when we hit the road. It was useful and I like that the “My Trips” sidebar is persistent across the entire site now. Glad to see they are improving the site almost weekly!
For the avid traveler, these are great improvements. Seriously, ask friends & colleagues who travel on vacation with frequency and you’ll hear about these needs. Although the travel space is crowded, the funding still occurs because nobody has gotten it completely correct — and there is still value in providing new/enhanced and evolving existing solutions.
I am currently using NileGuide to plan a trip to San Francisco. I live in St. Louis and know nothing about the Bay area, and this site has been immensely helpful. I’m really happy to see that they are growing and improving.
I planned a Scuba diving trip last year for my wife and I and found a lot of information on Nile Guide that I couldn’t find on other websites. I really like the local expert information and was able to save some good $$ by booking hotels based on those recommendations. I’m all for more and more competition when it comes to these websites. Do you really want Microsoft or Google running EVERYTHING?
Cool Feature: LOCAL EXPERT INFORMATION. But they need categories: 1. people who like to do drugs 2. people who like to look cool 3. people who hate people 4. people who hate tourists
hey Leena
May be you can just post a link to their press-release? Would save you so much time!
I agree, even for spanish speakers looks like a press release !, I would have expected a title like ” do we need another one?”
mariano
I used this site for more two international trips (one Europe and one SE Asia). Listen, there are a ton of travel sites around to mess around with but when it comes to planning you agenda you can hit the end of the web with all the sites and “info” out there… I kept finding myself popping back onto NileGuide b/c they have local experts that have the insider knowledge that helped me narrow down choices for activities, dining, and hotels… Nothing is worse than the uncertainty of arriving to a new country and THEN finding out how unrealistic your planned agenda is- NileGuide removed that problem for me twice! I also got most of the details on each activity right from their site! Keep building this site out… I have more traveling to do!
I went to the site, and something about it instantly rubbed me the wrong way. The user interface is very busy, ad space (mostly unsold) all around, and my overall first impression was that it was suited to Type-As who approach their vacation like their job. That said, I persisted and signed up to make some trips. I mostly stuck to places I’ve been, so I could evaluate better, but I also tried a couple new places. I also focused more on the “Things to Do” portion, since that’s where the guide-making part comes in.
Honestly, I liked it the more I used it, so it was mostly just the UI that turned me off initially. On the other hand, I didn’t feel that urge to head to the airport after I was done, and for me that’s unusual.
One test destination I thought would be informative was NYC, where I live and consider myself somewhat of an expert. The offered guides were okay, but that’s info you can get anywhere. I didn’t find that the filters were all that useful in paring down or sorting the 803(!) things to do in NYC.
The poster above said that the site helped prevent him from making an unrealistic itinerary, but that wasn’t my experience. (Maybe I missed a button?) I think this is the functionality where an aggregator can really shine. There are certain combinations of things that go well together, and some that really don’t, and there are some places that must be visited first thing in the morning. I amused myself by creating an itinerary for my worst enemy.
Bottom line: I’ll probably check back to the site next time I’m planning a real trip, but I don’t expect to be blown away, and I certainly wouldn’t use the site exclusively.
More generally, I’m skeptical about the fervor to aggregate all things travel. I do acknowledge that some trips benefit from careful research and planning, but I’ve never really been overwhelmed by the task, nor have I minded going to multiple sites. I read reviews of hotels at a hotel aggregator site before I book a room, but then I like to go looking for small sites that specialize in the destination, authored by local experts or enthusiastic amateurs. Add to that a couple travel articles and a guide book for the plane, and I’m all set.
On the other hand, this company has raised quite a bit of money, so obviously some people think this is the next big thing. I guess there are different kinds of travelers, but for the laid-back adventurer type, I think there are better options still.
tested the Vegas guide and was disappointed as well. Mediocre photos, generic content, nothing really different than whats out there in the travel space “which has alot of offerings”. I’m a bit surprised that they recieved 9.5 million I sure hope they have most of it left since I’ve seen comparable sites built for under 1m.
Most annoying was the windows popup error saying could not load page. This is happening on every other page.
I like the concept of printing a guide it sounds like a cool feature they jsut need to get it right.
Cheers,
one final note. hope you guys at NG get.
las-vegas/best/luxury-hotels
Wynn is not listed in top 15 and Luxor is at 5.
Anyone been at NG stayed at these two? I have and wynn is luxury and luxor should be under cheap
Hey JC,
You bring up an excellent point…I’ve actually been to both as well and I completely agree! Thanks to great feedback like this we’re able to update and keep our content fresh and current…once upon a time the Luxor was one of the best hotels in Vegas, but gone are the days of the family casinos and we’re now in the era of “What happens in Vegas…” Check out the vegas/best/luxury-hotels now! http://www.nile...t/luxury-hotels
Thanks again for the great bit of feedback!
There’s a big difference between simple information sites and planning sites. I don’t think anyone has got it totally right yet, but NG comes the closest. The whole concept of producing (and printing) custom guides will be massive, and there will be big success for whoever nails it. I think NG just needs to add more content, and make the site a little more intuitive to use, and they’ll be strong contenders in this field.
I travel a lot and use a variety of online sources to plan my trip from hotel reviews/booking sites to what to do once there. What I like about Nileguide’s organization of the points of interest is how you can browse through the various categoroies and save items/places of interest in one big list and THEN organize them into self-directed daily itineraries. The map on the right rail plots all the selected items (with handy color-coded tags for each type of activity) so you can see the clusters of items by neighborhood and thereby really plan your time well.
I am usually skeptical of the local insider type of listings, but Nileguode offers a nice hybrid of local expert tips as well as their own listings. When planning a trip to a place, a widget/real time list that shows the top places other travelers have been putting on their itineraries to the same place. This would not only balance the Nileguide curated with local’s insider listing but also telegraph to me the hot spots (especially bars/restaurants.)
Just used it to plan the trip to Amsterdam. It wasn’t very intuitive how I could have created my first guide, ALTHOUGH I work in this field.
It would need a bit more work there, as a demo maybe or a huge button with info on it.