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.

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NileGuide, one-stop travel planning site, has launched an iPhone app for its travel guide and planning portal. The startup, which lets you create a customized trip itinerary, will now let users view the customized guides they create on Nile’s site on their iPhones.

Users can browse all the descriptions and map locations of events, restaurants, hotels, bars and landmarks that are scheduled in their trips and see their day by day itinerary. The app also lets any user, regardless of whether they have made a NileGuide itinerary, see suggested trip itineraries near their current location for any of Nile’s destinations around the world. The guides are displayed in order of user rating and are also classified by type of trip, such as first-time, kid-friendly, off the beaten path, etc.

NileGuide’s website has more functionality, including the ability to see CitySearch reviews of restaurants and to book flights and car rentals from Expedia, Priceline and other sites, but have not added this to the app. This is understandable, considering the popularity of CitySearch and Yelp’s apps, which NileGuide couldn’t compete with. Expedia has a similar iPhone app that lets you access your trip itinerary but doesn’t let you access event or restaurant listings. Travel Tracker is another useful itinerary iPhone app that’s built off of TripIt’s itinerary platform.

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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.

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Nile Guide, a sophisticated travel planning site that launched just over a month ago, has raised $8 million in Series B from Austin Ventures, Lehman Brothers, and existing investors Draper Richards and KPG Ventures. The round brings Nile Guide’s total to over $9.5 million.

We’re told that since launch, the site has added support for 5 more destinations: Istanbul, Vienna, Sedona, New Orleans, and Cusco. The homepage has been simplified so you can select destinations from a list. And Nile Guide now suggests particular neighborhoods that it thinks you should check out when visiting a destination.

Internet Explorer 6 support is planned for July 1st, as is support for Moscow, Shanghai, Vail, Calgary/Canadian Rockies, and Costa Rica. No word yet on when the site will work in Safari.

Also see our coverage of Dave Sifry’s Offbeat Guides.

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Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources, customized to you personally and then delivered via PDF instantly or (a color printed version) by mail within 4 business days. Data comes from open sources like wikipedia, wikitravel, Flickr and Google Maps, as well as proprietary sources that have cut deals with the company. And you can create a guide for virtually anywhere in the world – they have 30,000 or so destinations today, and will be adding regional versions in the futures (”France” or “Napa Valley” for example).

Users can add or remove sections that appeal to them (museums, for example, or walking tours), and the guides include things like up to date weather forecasts, events that are going on during your visit, current exchange rates, etc. If you tell it where you are staying, the guide will include walking maps based on that location. An example guide that I created is embedded below.

The guides aren’t free – a printed version costs $25, PDF (which can be printed at home or downloaded to a laptop or Kindle) is $10. Unsatisfied customers can get a full refund, the site says, and keep the guide.

Offbeat Guides raised a small seed round of financing (a “few hundred thousand dollars” says Sifry) in February 2008. The first 250 people to use the code “TechCrunch” can get into the beta immediately, along with coupons for two free books.

Also below is an interview with Sifry about Offbeat Guides from last week (Thanks to Michael Pick for the video branding work). And see our coverage of Nile Guide, which is also allowing users to create personalized travel itineraries.

Paris Travel Guide By Offbeat Guides – Find Documents

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Usually when people decide it’s time for a vacation, they don’t start from absolute scratch. They have ideas as to what types of experiences they’d like to have, even if they have no clue as to where and how they’ll have them.

Nile Guide is a travel planning website launching today with an appreciation for that fact. It has aggregated travel data from over 10 sources, including Citysearch, OpenTable, and Expedia, and added its own reports and reviews from local experts for 80 international destinations. It’s then made all of the information searchable from within a tool that takes into consideration both objective and subjective factors related to your preconceived preferences.

There are four main search types on Nile Guide: food, lodging, nightlife, and “see & do”. When you search from within any one of them, you can filter the results in real-time using a variety of criteria.

For example, you can choose to view only restaurants in a given city/region that are lively, quiet, off beat, romantic, kid friendly, or business oriented. Results can be further tailored by neighborhood, cuisine, and costliness. Finally, you can choose to see results that match keywords such as “sushi”, and you can order results by their distance from notable landmarks such as the airport.

The same type of capabilities are possible for the other three search types. Want to spend sometime outdoors while visiting Las Vegas? Tell Nile Guide how strenuous you like your activity, and what types of activities in particular you enjoy, and it will retrieve the appropriate results for you. Its “secret sauce” consists of its ability to break down data already available elsewhere into subjective measurements like strenuousness and liveliness.

Nile Guide is not just about advanced search; it wants to be a one stop travel planning service. As such, you can use it to view trip itineraries submitted by others, construct your own itineraries by adding and scheduling items found on the site, and book rooms and activities straight from the service.

One particularly notable feature is the ability to download a print-ready PDF of your itinerary for free (although cluttered with advertisements like a magazine). It would be nice to see these printed materials offered as an on-demand, premium service so you could mail order them right to your door. Update: CEO Josh Steinitz tells me they had actually decided to provide the printed guidebooks sans advertisements and will provide this type of shipping service in the future.

Overall, Nile Guide is a welcome addition to the online travel scene with search capabilities that greatly surpass TripAdvisor’s. See Zicasso for another attempt to improve the online trip planning process, and InsideTrip for an airline ticket site with the same inclinations.

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