by Vas Mylko
Who will define and rule travel from 2020? Where Curiosio plugs in? This post should better be read from a big screen, because it contains infographics, screenshots, big collages and clips recorded from the big screen.
Era of Online Travel
There was an era of online travel, from the early 1990s to mid 2010s, with its best period between mid 1990s and mid 2000s. Now that era is over.
It was a travel mafia. The pioneers who drove the progress of online travel knew each other, were doing deals with each other, built networks with each other since late 1990s. There is no better recap of that era than THE DEFINITIVE ORAL HISTORY OF ONLINE TRAVEL by Dennis Schaal, Skift.
After 2005 huge aggregation took place. Expedia acquired Venere, Trivago, Travelocity, Orbitz, HomeAway. TripAdvisor acquired Viator, LaFourchette. Priceline acquired Bookings, Agoda, Kayak, Momondo, Cheapflights, Rentalcars, OpenTable. Expedia and TripAdvisor themselves got purchased by InterActiveCorp.
Interesting fact — Amazon tried to jump into the old era of online travel back in 2001. “Amazon has a history of pulling back from online travel. Earlier in 2001 it teamed up with Expedia and in 2006 it forged an alliance with Sidestep. However, none of those partnerships proved to be successful.” Read more about Amazon travel efforts on Forbes.
Ctrip and Alitrip (now Fliggy) are from that era.
Transition Period
Transition started somewhere in late 2000s and is ending right now. There were several of them, who could re-invent travel: Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.
Airbnb launched in the middle of 2008. That was neither easy nor smooth. In the Winter 2009 Paul Graham (Y Combinator) pursued Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures, investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zinga, Kickstarter, MongoDB) to invest into Airbnb. Read how it went from Wilson’s side. Read how it went from Graham’s side. The rest is history: ~190 countries, ~5M listings, ~400M guest arrivals since 2008. In 2015 Airbnb purchased Vamo — multi-city trip planning technology (by air). Launched Airbnb Trips in 2016, and corporate travel.
Foursquare launched in early 2009. By same Dennis Crawley who sold the similar product to Google, that they closed and replaced by Google Latitude. Foursquare was phenomenal. It was time of location-based services boom. O’Reilly ran Where 2.0 conferences back then… In 2010 Facebook launched Facebook Places, as a competitor to Foursquare. There were Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Latitude and others back then. Check out feature by feature comparison of them all.
Facebook purchased travel recommendations Nextstop; checkins & status update technology Hot Potato, both in Summer 2010; location-based technology Gowalla, and geo-tagged photo sharing Instagram, both in 2011. Then Foursquare pivoted to Yelp biz model, but Facebook pursued travel. In 2016 Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi predicted Facebook as a travel force. In 2017 Facebook silently hired professional from Expedia to build travel vertical.
Google purchased map technologies Keyhole, Where2 in 2004; geo-tagged photo sharing Panoramio in 2007. Then visual travel guide & discovery Ruba; knowledge graph tech Metaweb; both in 2010. Next purchase was iconic for travel — ITA Software in 2011 — used by several OTAs and dozens of airlines. Then Google purchased restaurants lists an reviews Zagat; local recommendations Clever Sense; both in 2011. In 2012 Google bought Frommer’s — a travel guidebook series created by Arthur Frommer. Frommer’s has 350+ guidebooks across 14 series, during its 60 years of guidebook publishing. After pulling it all into the knowledge graph, Google sold it back to Arthur Frommer.
Microsoft created Expedia back then, but did not create something for the new era. Microsoft is in corporate travel today.
Amazon made second attempt to get into travel. Initially it was Amazon Local, with daily deals for discounted hotels, for weekend getaways; competing with Groupon. Travel booking site Amazon Destinations was launched in early 2015. It was more sophisticated travel reservation service, also focusing on weekend retreats and getaways. Both Amazon Local and Amazon Destinations were shut down in 2015. That fiasco acknowledged a start of new era.
Big Three emerged from the transition period are: Airbnb, Google and Facebook. Amazon and Microsoft are still trying to get into new travel via Alexa and Cortana, but that is not sufficient for a driving force. Airbnb, Google and Facebook will drive the future of travel, globally.
Era of Interactive Travel
Physical and digital interactions.
Airbnb announced Trips in 2016. It sounded louder than it was. Maximum they could provide was (and still is) a lodging at the destination, and experiences staged by locals at that destinations or vicinity. Airbnb Experiences are very humane and interactive. Founders-designers keep the bar high. Kudos!
Airbnb are planning Flights and Services. Will Airbnb buy Hopper? Or will Google buy Hopper? Meanwhile, efforts on the knowledge graph and the platform are revealed in the job post (snapshot below, in a case of closed position).
Google has a lot of travel planning and productivity tools and technologies. Hotel and Restaurant Finders were so deeply and smoothly integrated, that you can search for hotels right on Google and in Google Maps and get a list of hotels & restaurants with prices, photos, reviews and Street View panoramas. The same deep integration was done for Frommer’s POIs. There is no better knowledge graph of POIs than Google’s. Kudos!
Next big things are Google Travel Guides and Google Trips. You could see Travel Guide when you search for Rome. There will be an info box on the right (like screenshot above), and could be “Things to do in Rome” widget and “Rome Travel Guide” entry point below it, right in the middle of the first page with search results. There are day plans, based on actual visits (Google knows that from Gmail, Google Maps, GPS, Androids), and there are those genuinely written by Google. There are select multi-day plans, lower on the page, all based on actual visits. Google doesn’t show what the best multi-day trip plan could be, avoiding responsibility for the relevance and accuracy. There is no optimization by duration & budget either.
With Google Trips users can plan for upcoming trips with info about the destination in several categories such as day plans, reservations, things to do. There are complete day guides to ~200 cities (some based on actual visits, some written by Google). There is integration for locating flight, hotel, car, and restaurant reservations for the trip based on emails from the Gmail.
Touring Bird is an experiment by Google’s Area 120. Obviously it’s a probe to benchmark capabilities against Airbnb Experiences.
That’s not all from Google. In October 2018 they are launching new travel planning tools. One of them is called Your Trips. Your Trips app is about making the process of searching for a flight and hotel easier for holidays. Find the best things to do once you reach your destination. Choose the holiday season when you will be traveling to see historic flight price trends and current hotel deals. Will Google buy Hopper?
And it’s still not it about Google’s travel effort. Come on our geeky reader, there is more. In 2013 Google released Ingress — location-based, augmented-reality mobile game developed by Niantic (internal Google startup by Keyhole’s John Hanke). In 2014 Google was a lead investor (round total is $542M) in Augmented Reality startup Magic Leap. Google could leapfrog Airbnb Experiences with Augmented Reality immersion [by Niantic, Magic Leap and 3rd party AR developers].
Facebook has City Guides in mobile app (not mobile web). “It is not some kind of jaw-dropping, killer app or piece of functionality but, in fact, a simple way of collating all the likely elements that a traveler would want when they are in a destination.” Read more about Facebook City Guides on Tnooz.
More to come from Facebook. They are building a travel vertical. Here are job positions for Facebook Travel (snapshot below, in a case of closed positions). Reminder: Facebook already hired former online travel executive Nikhilesh Ponde from Expedia, and confirmed this hire.
Facebook has a Places Graph with 140M places around the world — the same data that powers Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. There are Search, Current Place, and Place Information endpoints, so you can find places relevant to your users and provide helpful information about each location. The Places Graph is free for software developers, processing trillions of queries nowadays. Possible to search for places, enable place discovery, location sharing, and geo-tagging, add location awareness to your app, understand people’s current place, and access information about it. Places Graph SDK is available for Android and iOS.
Curiosio
“Composer. I want this service — I enter places in a city, it makes a plan. Or I enter cities that I want to visit, and it builds a route for me. Or I name the countries, and it tells how to better and faster visit them. This service must do it all within time and budget constraints, these are two main parameters. There is nothing even close to this out there. Many could show [as maximum] options from point to point. But the future is in organization of relations between N points.” — Artemy Lebedev
Many people want this service. Curiosio will be finding the most curious trip in any geography by your interests within desired time & budget. Curiosio is powered by the AI optimization engine called Ingeenee. Ingeenee solves NP-complete complexity. Tourists get better trips: either more travel value for same money & duration, or savings of money & time for same travel value, or both benefits simultaneously — more travel value with savings. There is simplistic beta1, pre-MVP beta2, and we are currently working on beta3; showcase is planned in Nov 2018 at two AI conferences.
Ingeenee could be connected to any knowledge graph of POIs (availability, weather), any inventory (lodging, tours, experiences), any booking (lodging, flight, car, concerts), any inter-city transportation, any intra-city transportation, any user interests, any comfort and safety, and UI AI.
Ingeenee is designed on top of our own knowledge graph and routing technology. Flights to be added a bit later; we’re working with partners on this matter. Experiences are on the road map; we’ll start working with partners in 2019. When the new era is settled with Big Three — Airbnb, Google, Facebook — by 2020 or so, we could connect with their knowledge graphs, inventories, experiences, users, devices.
Curiosio is an interactive layer over Ingeenee. We want Curiosio to stand out with look & feel out there. From 2020 Curiosio will be UI AI (with emotional intelligence) for planning and in-destination.
Travel Trio 2020: Airbnb, Google, Facebook
