The blog has been quiet lately as we’re getting quite close to the seed fund raising of the firm in July, putting most of our efforts there and the rest in handling requests on the site.
But, travel world keeps changing and we do keep one eye open on that, here are three nice stories:
Travel site visitors aren’t so young
Let’s start with demographics, online travel demographics brought together by Emarketer reveal the average profile of travel site users, and there’s some surprise there: 48% of the US visitors of travel sites are 45 or older. 73% are 35 or older. If we estimate that these are not highly likely to embrace technological changes rather quickly, what can they do with sophisticated tools such as Farecast prediction systems? Not too much I’m afraid.
They need products to speak in their language, both technologically and verbally.
Hotels recommendations and price comparison
Vibeagent (still in private beta) offers users not only to recommend hotels and their specific rooms, but also to stay on its territory and make the price comparison for these rooms’ reservations. How would we imagine that in flights? Users recommending on the best airline/flight for a given route, and that rating is offered next to price.
We appreciate every development that combines travel price comparison and user generated content, so we’ll keep an eye open on Vibeagent.
Business class travel search engine
Now this product is getting closer to what we’ll be introducing soon. Biz class Travel Market is a very non web 2.0ish name and the engine could see some major improvements, but the segmentation of the market deserves applause. Business/first class are a different type of audience with different needs and plenty of incentives offered by suppliers to the ones who can reach their masses. We think that luxury classes travelers deserve more than what they get from the web today, this site is a step in the right way.
