Can a travel planning startup succeed?

The travel planner pitch has been around for a while. It begins with “Travel is broken. The average consumer must use 36 websites to plan their trip.”

The solution is to create a super platform where you can research, book, share, and manage all your travel in one place.

While go-to-market strategies used to be content marketing and SEO, they now primarily involve peer-to-peer sharing and influencers on social networks.

But until now, travel planners have always failed.

There were a number of problems with the proposed solution.

• content. Gathering and organizing the necessary information can be very difficult and expensive to build. There needs to be breadth and depth of global destination content, it needs to be up-to-date, and it needs to be bookable wherever relevant.
• Users and Loyalty. Once you build them, how do you find users? Even if you have an answer to this, how do you store them so you don’t have to pay Google every time? Like almost every travel company on the planet. , for the majority of humans, lack of travel frequency is the enemy here as well.
• product. Does your product work? Can you overcome the learning curve for new users? Consumers are pretty familiar with Google, and most of the big online travel agencies offer a good user experience, or at least There are no particular problems with airline tickets or hotels.
• Revenue. Assuming it works well and users come back, can you monetize that traffic? Travel planners are typically at the top of the funnel before transactions occur.

Not this time

• content. With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the barrier to entry here is gone. Any website connected to generative artificial intelligence can now access travel content from around the world. With little development, you can triangulate that content with sources like Google Places to ensure it’s fresh and relevant. You could argue that the world’s largest travel company has lost 100% of its former advantage when it comes to content. This content can also be searched without the need for complex algorithms or classifications.
• user. These days, there is a much larger target market of consumers who are comfortable transacting online. But market size was never the important factor; nothing else has changed. When it comes to retention, people are definitely more motivated to use apps these days, but you still need to get users to your app in the first place. Modern technology platforms make it easy to create gamification, and he could be one of the solutions. But ultimately, the problem is as big as ever.
• product. When it comes to development, everything has become easier and more accessible. Easy and cheap cloud hosting, access to better application programming interfaces (APIs) on both the content and reservation sides, and great tools to improve efficiency and the end product. Personalization can also be done now without requiring previous customer booking data. This allows for personalization that really works, something that hasn’t been possible in travel before. Many consumers enjoy planning trips, and many argue that’s why these tools aren’t necessary. Certainly, the right solution could solve the problem by recreating that fun within the platform itself.
• Revenue. You could also argue that if you resolve all of the above, this part will eventually resolve itself. A good and attractive product should be able to convert enough customers to create viability, at least at the hotel or experience stage. The pressure here is less than it used to be because the price to build a solution is a fraction of what it was a few years ago.

The problem is that one could argue that any of these factors act as a super veto on the success of every travel planning startup. All problems must be resolved to avoid failure.

It may also be a question of definition. What is the difference between a travel planning tool and a travel research website that has some built-in tools? A question that most people can probably claim to be on the right side of this debate with.

If I were a betting man, I’d be the first to say that Gemini, along with Google Travel and Maps, will be the first successful travel planning product. As for startups, I’m still on the fence.

In the near future, we will have the best travel planning tool ever created. So, if someone builds the ultimate tool that actually works, has access to travel information from all over the world, and has all the features you could hope for, will people actually use it and be successful?

My best guess is…maybe.