At Launch Silicon Valley this past week, I saw a demo of Gliider, a Firefox plug-in and tool that allows you to drag and drop travel information you collect from around the web. The video explains the concept behind Gliider, which is still in private beta, fairly well. While the travel 2.0 space is nearly saturated with a plethora of competitive products, Gliider’s tool is incredibly useful and its focus is narrow (Gliider only wants to help users with planning), which could make it standout in the crowd.
After you download the plug-in, you can pop-out the Gliider trip planner box from your browser when you need it. Within the planner box, you can create a trip, specify where you are traveling to (Gliider’s search box offers auto suggestions), and when you plan to go. Gliider will automatically create folders for each type of information, including flights, hotels, shopping, transport and food. You can also create customized folders.
When you come across useful travel info, like hotel, restaurant, or flight listings, you can highlight the text and images and simply drag and drop the info into the box. Once the item is in the organizer, you can make insert comments to each item. It replaces bookmarking for travel and automatically organizes links, sites, and listings for you. Once you’ve finished the planning process of a trip, Gliider will email you all your details in a PDF file. The startup will also be rolling out a iPhone app that will let you view your planned trips.
Gliider’s proprietary technology will read where and when you will be traveling and provide customized hotel deals for you. And Gliider will also track hotel deals, letting you know when a price goes up or down. The tool doesn’t yet do the same for flights, which would also be a useful item to track. Gliider will soon have a “ask around” feature, which via Facebook Connect, will let you solicit advice on a trip or listing from your Facebook friends.
Gliider mainly makes money from affiliate fees—when they suggest deals (they have a partnership with Expedia) and a user clicks to the deal and books, Gliider will get a cut from the purchase. The startup’s CEO and co-founder Jordan Stopler, declined to say how much they receive in these deals but also added that the startup will be offering deals on flights as well in the future. Gliider will also be adding functionality for IE8 soon.
The most obvious and serious competitor to Gliider in this space is TripIt, a popular travel site (and one that Mike can’t live without) that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your email confirmations from hotels and airlines. NileGuide also is similar in function. But the beauty of Gliider is that it’s solely focused on planning a trip and not on creating a step by step itinerary for travelers. And the fact that Gliider is a plug-in makes it easy to access and integrate with the browser experience.
makes makes
hehe! Saw that too
makes makes
the only hindrance is that it is a firefox plug in. I am assuming they would be coming up with something for iPhone and IE
Yes—both are in train.
-Jordan
Yahoo trip planer was here from 2005, no? what’s the big new thing? firefox ext? c’mon…
Love this, Congrats on Launching.
I love it! this app is just awesome!
This plug in will be very usefull…If i am reading into this right, it will blow away yahoo trip planner and Trip-It by bringing YOU content based on your recent searches – not to mention eliminate the mess in my favorites folder.
How are they going to make money?
The Expedia partnership is a show-stopper for me – not reliable or cost-effective enough in my experience
Dear Leena,
Kind thanks for your detailed and accurate look at gliider.
I’d like to gently disagree with who you’ve cast as competition. We’ve great respect for both NileGuide and TripIt. But gliider offers a service sufficiently distinct from both sites such that we don’t really consider them competitors. Indeed, TripIt’s offering is complimentary to ours: where gliider helps you manage travel info before you book, TripIt helps you stay sorted once you’ve made reservation. Similarly, travelers will find that because gliider sits on your web browser, it can be used in conjunction with NileGuide (or any other content site) to make the most of the travel planning experience.
Jordan Stolper
CEO and Co-Founder
gliider
So – can I email my itineraries to gliider like I can to tripit? Seems this has some cool bells and whistles but lacks the basics. Also – while this might be useful for vacations not sure it has any applicability to business travel…
I think this is a great tool. I just wish it were easily used for all kinds of content, tracking information for whatever topic I may be researching online and allowing me to easily drag and comment on it for my own reference.
Any suggestions on similar tools that are less vertical-specific?
Thanks.
I think the idea is that gliider and TripIt are trying to offer different features in their service that are complementary to one another. So the same “convenient” service you found on TripIt may not be found on gliider, but there could be a replacement for it. So best thing is to just try it out yourself. Like the drag-and-drop functionality in gliider though – looks cool, and convenient that I don’t have to look through a whole webpage again to find the information I need.
TripIt.com
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