Most of the OTAs have already realized the potential of a captive audience and how they can form an opinion using the power of captive audience, whether to use a particular website for ticket or holiday bookings or not? Makemytrip and Yatra has already launched their travel community portal called oktatabyebye.com and raahi.com. There is another player, Holidayiq, which I guess has got some funding. Now, a new player which I came across is called travelobuddies.com. On the lines of ok and raahi, this has got few interesting concepts like home stay, travel bazaar and travel news which I think will certainly be of value to people.

Does that make a bubble? Maybe. But just as in the 1st bubble, some big players will come out that will legitimately change the online travel platform, and thus the consumer will ultimately benefit.

But then again, maybe my perspective is skewed. I’m one of those guys who was backpacking around the world, and saw first hand how the travel industry needed a change- which ultimately became the catalyst for our “travel 2.0″ startup – Travature. In the year that we’ve been bootstrapping our company I’ve observed a few surprising things:
1. The travel industry is largely all about backdeals and general shadiness, the consumer is rarely, if ever, put first. Probably the best example is our parnership negotiations for our airfare search engine. Airlines are blown away when we saw we don’t want money from them. We figure, hey its their content, we are just providing a service for consumers to find it in one place. Its not like Google charges people to be in their search engine… But surprisingly, this mentality is unheard of in the travel industry.
2. Many travel startups are founded by Joe Important Blow, previously from Expedia, Travelocity, or whatever. Obviously this attracts lots of VC interest because of their “strong management background” but my take is that if they were looking out for the suits and not the traveler at their previous large company, they probably have that ingrained in them at their new well hyped startup too.
3. As pointed out in the blog there is a huge amount of VC money being thrown around. I have mixed feelings about this, because I think a lot of that excess will go to leather chairs and fancy conference rooms, ala bubble 1.0. Obviously thats not going to benefit the traveler, and that sort of misses the whole point. On the otherhand despite Katie’s beliefs, a new innovative entry into the online travel space is NOT necessarily “low capital business”. I can attest to quotes we’ve received from potential technology partners and tell you metasearching is not cheap, and there are a lot of other areas in the travel platform that need a decent level of investment as well.

As for us, we will continue to quietly bootstrap, and build a platform with the traveler in mind. At this point we are at a very early level, but our mentality is that innovation in the travel space is a marathon, not a sprint, and we think thats the right longterm strategy because our longterm vision is focused on real travelers like us, not suits with big pocket books.

Jeremy Almond
Founder of Travature.com

Especially if your intention is to experience private, luxury, philanthropic travel.

The Philanthropic Travel Foundation

Our mission is to connect people from around the world at the heart. Please join us at a humanitarian outreach program for a half-day of fulfilling and intense personal discovery next time you are enjoying the luxury of exotic travel. Our planning resources are free to travelers and non-profit organizations.

This may not be the case for all of Expedia’s hotel partners simply because the market is huge, and many of them don’t take the time to foster a strong relationship with this client. However the value of such a relationship is evidenced to me each and every time I’m given the opportunity to make up where I fell short in the eyes of my guests.