Travel Industry

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.

With the launch of City Tours (http://citytours.googlelabs.com/), Google adds to the list of trip-planning solutions which use some combination of local data, maps, user generated content and social networking tools.

Google City Tours

City Tours is still under Google Labs , and as such, it’s still pretty much in it’s infancy, but it’s already being touted as something with immense possibilities. City Tours points out the attractions and plans out multi-day trips. All you do is name the city and you’re good to go. And if you specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip, City Tours will map out a complete itinerary for you.

When you type in the city name, you get back a planned 3-day trip, with around 10-12 attractions mapped out per day. The site suggests time to be spent at each location, and walking distances between the mapped attractions. You can modify the number of days, and add new attractions.

It’s pretty basic and simple, and adding new attractions seems to work, so long as you don’t try to add some name or attraction which could have other meanings. But the interesting part is in the possibilities that City Tours offers. It uses Google Maps to figure out the relative positions of the attractions in each itinerary, and line them up so as to create a suggested tour with the minimum overall amount of walking necessary.

So you could, for example, work out a complete trip plan, starting from your hotel, throw in restaurants, attractions, shows, and a complete trip, rather than just the attractions. You could make it work for a multi-day roadtrip across state lines, involving multiple destinations.

And instead of just walking between destinations, if you could plug-in Google Transit to cover the distances between the attractions, that would make it even more closer to reality. You’d get a trip plan with suggested attractions for each day of your stay, and the closest public transport options for traveling from one point to the next. That’s pretty much all you’re looking for in a trip planner.

And there are plenty of sites, like GoPlanit, which already offer something close to this. The difference with Google is the vast scale of it and the user participation - pretty soon, people will have added so many attractions to each place that the system will be bigger and better than what any other trip planning site can offer.