It’s been a tough couple of years for websites dedicated to travel planning, save for TripIt, which was snapped up earlier this year for a cool $120 million. But lately there seem to be encouraging signs in the arena, particularly from two similar companies: Wanderfly and TravelMuse.

Wanderfly actually is celebrating its first anniversary today, and has released a one-minute video showcasing 500 travelers going to 500 places from photos uploaded to the company’s website by users during the past year. The company also shared some impressive statistics.

According to Christy Liu, one of Wanderfly’s founders, and a handy “Year of Inspiration” graphic, the site has:

• inspired four million trips with users from 217 countries;
• earned a Webby nomination, was named a Top 10 NYC Startup by Time Inc., and made the Top 100 Brilliant Companies by Entrepreneur magazine;
• launched its “Also Recommended” widget on 1,000 New York Times travel pages; and
• seen traffic increase 40 percent the past month.

The site aims to help visitors find inspiring destinations with information culled from 19 different travel partners and a tool where users plug in variables, such as budget, location, length of stay and desired activities, and receive destination recommendations that match the entered parameters.

TravelMuse, which launched in 2008 and helps travelers share itineraries and find destination ideas with a nearly identical inspiration tool as Wanderfly—yes, there are some differences, but this post isn’t a comparison of the sites—has shown signs of resurrection lately. After being purchased by the Travel Ad Network last November, then lying low the past 12 months, the company started Tweeting regularly again and adding posts to its Facebook page and its blog, TravelMusings, about three weeks ago.

Since then, traffic appears to be on the rise for the company, with a 23 percent jump logged for September on Compete.com. (Admittedly, Compete gives an estimate that isn’t always up-to-date for non-pro users, but it’s nice to see a rebound, nonetheless.) In addition, MakeUseOf.com, which writes about “cool websites, computer tips and downloads that make you more productive,” recommended TravelMuse today as a site that makes trip planning easier.

Sure, anniversaries are fun to celebrate, and revived content and traffic increases are positive signs, but whether these indicators of growth will be ongoing remains to be seen. Wanderfly announced it is working on a 2.0 version of the site, due out the first quarter of 2012. No news yet on what new features TravelMuse may have in store for the near future, but here’s hoping both companies (along with other related sites) continue to grow in the coming year. An increasing number of users interested in online travel planning is a good bet for the travel industry overall.

Photo: Wanderfly

(Editor’s Note: For full disclosure, as mentioned in previous posts where I have written about TravelMuse, I am a former employee of the company but have not had a direct relationship with the site since 2009.)

Related posts:
Wanderfly Unveils 25 ‘New’ Destinations and Other April 1 Fun
TripIt’s Sale: Time to Reward Travel Planning Sites or Narrow the Field?
TravelMuse Rolls Out New Travel Planner

Los Altos, CA based TravelMuse (www.travelmuse.com) today unveiled a new travel planner and Trip Widget, along with a contest which offers TravelMuse users a chance to win a free luxury vacation in Hawaii.

TravelMuse

Russ Lemelin, CEO of TravelMuse, said that the new TravelMuse Planner “makes the chaos of travel planning easy and fun by providing a central place to save, organize and share all your travel research for any destination.”

After giving all the new TravelMuse tools a once-over, I have to say that what Russ Lemelin claims is pretty much accurate.

Create Trip:- Type in the destination name and click the create button. You now have a trip folder where all your research from both within and outside of TravelMuse will be available.

Bookmarker:- Get the new TravelMuse Bookmarker, and you now have the ability to save pages, photos and text from any website into aforementioned trip folder. 

Organizing, Schedules & Map:- When you’re browsing through a ton of links and pages, the TravelMuse Planner makes it easy by helping you tag and sort everything into categories and schedules (Day 1, Day 2, etc.).

You can see the result of all your research on an interactive map, and get more recommendations for popular items – attractions, hotels, shops, restaurants - based on what you already have.

Collaboration & Sharing:- If you want to show off your trip plan or need advice, you can invite people over to view or edit your masterpiece. Ask for advice on facebook, and comments made by your friends will automatically end up saved in your trip folder. Use the TravelMuse Trip Widget to display the trip plan on your site, blog or on your social networking pages.

All of this – the destination guides, the trip folder, bookmarker and the widget are useful enough. But what makes the whole thing likeable, or as Russ Lemelin says “makes the chaos of travel planning easy and fun” is that the user experience is positive.

- Pages and tools load fast, and its easy to use. Just click on what you see and like, and you’ll end up with a planned trip.
- Ads are discreet, with no bells & whistles to interrupt or divert you from trip planning.
- Pages from outside not only get saved, but the tools also recognize the page and translate it into a physical address, so you can see all your selections on the map.
- Your research at every stage is safe. It won’t vanish if you accidently click something or close the window.

Free trip to Hawaii:- TravelMuse has partnered with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau (HVCB) to give away a luxury trip for two to Oahu through the “Create a Trip on TravelMuse, Win Your Perfect Moment in Hawaii” sweepstakes.

Winner gets round-trip airfare for 2 to Honolulu, a 5-night stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and free admission to four hot attractions in Hawaii. All you need to do is register on TravelMuse and create a trip. More details here.

On Tuesday, I had been invited back to speak alongside Homeaway and Starwood at the Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference about trends in online travel.

I wanted to solicit your thoughts on three topics. With your help, perhaps we can spice up the discussion:

1. Which start-ups will get the capital they need to survive?
2. Who will benefit during the long slow travel recovery over the next 2-3 years?
3. Mobile and social media are the rage in travel, but is anyone going to generate revenue from it?

First look into your crystal ball: Who is going public? Which of the start-ups is going to get the capital they need to survive?

How do you think 2010 will play out for the online travel players looking to go public? Travelport has already postponed their IPO. How about Homeaway (fresh off their Super Bowl ad) and Kayak (rebounding nicely from airfare fee cuts and with their own NFL ads)? And let’s not forget Sabre. Which of them will have successful IPOs?

The myriad of travel start-ups that need follow-up capital to survive (e.g. Nileguide, Travelmuse, Yapta) will surely be grateful for the inevitable positive trickledown effect if there are successful travel IPOs. A number of start-ups have already had to shutter (Professional Travel Guide) or cut back (Oyster, Tripology). Which start-ups will fail, which will get the capital they need to survive and grow?

Remember Elliott’s ‘Field of Dreams’ post? Here is Compete.com on which of the start-ups are getting and holding customer mindshare.

What a difference a year can make! At last year’s Goldman Sachs conference, we still had OTA fees to book flights. And Expedia was close to its 52 week low of $6.3 (now trading in the mid-20s) and Orbitz was close to its 52 week low of $1.2 (now trading in the $6-7 range). I’m hopeful for the online travel sector. But I want your opinion!

Please take a second look into your crystal ball: who will be the winners and losers as consumer and business travel slooooooooooooooooooooooowly bounces back?

Let’s put aside the extraordinary results from Priceline and strong results from Expedia. They are taking shares from suppliers, other channels and the other OTAs for a number of reasons. Yeah, they are kicking it. And will likely continue to.

Putting these two behemoths (and their subsidiaries – Booking.com, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor) aside – who else will win and lose from the slow, painful recovery?

First, some hard data: some (almost) good news on the Hotel RevPAR front. {Note: Hotel RevPAR is a key metric in the hotel industry that measures the amount of revenue that hotels generate from the rooms they have available. The equation for RevPAR is occupancy (% of time available rooms are filled) X revenue per available room.}

Why only ‘almost’ good news? Because this graph from Piper Jaffrey and Smith Travel Research tells us that RevPAR is declining more slowly. In October of 2009, RevPAR declined 14% from 2008 and in November RevPAR declined 12%. And in December, RevPAR only declined 8%. Now, ‘declining more slowly’ is not the same as growing, but… it’s better than shrinking at an increasing rate.

So, let’s assume we are on our way back. And let’s assume, as it did after 1992 and 2001, that it takes about 2 years to get back to where we were before the dips.

Which online travel companies will survive and which will thrive during this slow recovery – and why?

Some winners may well be those from the ‘old’ school evolving their business (e.g. Lonely Planet’s digital content sales growing 40-50% annually – including direct sales via the iPhone), start-ups evolving old proven models (e.g. Getaroom, Bloomspot and Groupon), or companies cracking international markets.

Final look into your crystal ball: mobile and social media are all the rage, and online travel is no exception. But how does it translate into economic benefit? The TripAdvisor Media Group (owned by Expedia) will generate north of $400 million in 2010 revenue is no small part because of their dominant position in hotel reviews. No one is generating bookings from mobile. So, who in online travel is going to be able to generate material, quantifiable benefits from mobile or social media?

Please don’t hold back! Unlike Jeff Boyd (Priceline) and Dara Khosrowshahi (Expedia), I don’t get invited to the Goldman Sachs conference to speak because I run billion dollar online travel companies that dominate the sector. I’m assuming I get invited because I’m an opinionated SOB. So help me out

If you would rather share your opinions in private, please feel to email me at yen (at) uptake.com

If you have data and factoids to support your opinions, that would be a welcome bonus!

Bring it on!

The folks over at Travelmuse are heralding the unveiling of the latest release of the TravelMuse Planner. The new Planner is reportedly a huge improvement over the previous one, and is now the ‘most advanced yet intuitive trip planning solution on the Web.’

Travelmuse

I’m having visions of ‘The Planner’ becoming self-aware and going around waking people in the night and forcing them to start planning for a trip.

You think that’s a joke? Go to the TravelMuse homepage (www.travelmuse.com/), just type in a destination and give it a test-run.

You’ll end up hooked, and doing travel research for a trip you didn’t know you wanted to take. That’s because the new Travelmuse Planner makes the whole thing seem like a  breeze – it’s a lot easier to find and save content you like, both on Travelmuse and from elsewhere on the web.

Travelmuse Tripfolio

That, in turn, is because of the new features that have been implemented, like the Tripfolio that follows you around and dutifully saves and lists all the pages that interest you. Another new useful tool that is now available on Travelmuse is the embedded search facility.

Somebody at Travelmuse probably came to the conclusion (and rightly so) that no matter how great your website is and even if you offer everything that they want, travelers will always want to check out some more sites. With embedded search, Travelmuse is allowing that impluse free rein, but without losing the visitor to other sites.

With this feature, you can save web pages from outside directly to the trip plan without leaving TravelMuse. Saves you the trouble of keeping multiple windows open and bookmarking tons of pages.

Travelmuse embedded search

And by storing it all at Travelmuse, no matter what kind of page it is - a hotel review, article, or a blog post, you get to see the big picture when you want to start making sense of the gazzilion pages you just went through.

And they’re also refocusing their content to enhance it’s value to the trip planning process. In a blog post, Travelmuse CEO Kevin Fliess says that from now on, “you’ll see fewer general articles and more bite-sized pearls of wisdom specifically designed to make your trip planning experience better.”

In the next few months, Travelmuse is also planning to add destination ratings, recommended trips and descriptions of things to do at destinations.