An interesting issue you raise, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that "social discovery" isn't always the best answer to any question. For some categories it makes a lot of sense. For plenty more categories, it's a novelty at best, and the utility is questionable.
IMO, the best way to make travel "social" is to make social travel easier, viz., make organizing trips for groups easier. That's a legitimate problem to solve.
Perhaps, but I'd counter that with the trip I just planned I didn't need a tool to do it. I shared a google doc with a friend for one and had a couple skype calls. For another I just went over to her house and we figured out the dates, where we wanted to go etc. Her roommate might come now, as a friend whose in London. That is "social trip planning" but I'm not sure what framework, and there are a bunch out there, could help make that easier. A lot of it is serendipity based, and the logistics weren't that difficult in the first place.
The "where do we want to go and when?" question isn't the hard part, though. It's finding venues and flights with the best group rates and windows. It's not so much the front-end logistics and discovery aspect that's challenging; it's the back-end logistics. Especially as the group increases in size.
I don't think any app is going to effectively take choice and discussion out of the equation. Attempting to do that, especially with a category like leisure travel, is asking people to let an algorithm plan their vacations. Most people won't go for that; they want a large degree of choice and consideration in the process. But the stuff nobody likes doing -- planning flights, searching for fares, booking rooms, etc. -- is where the pain points reside.
Oh I agree. I guess I thought you were referring to a lot of these "comprehensive social trip planning" tools that help you collaborate on a trip. I think they are useless. I agree it's the problems like "ok, how do we get from Prague to Vienna" now that me and my buddy decided we want to go that are truly the hard part.
Something that could be solved with better search would be group travel for people originating in different cities. Call it "travel search for LDRs". I am in city X, someone else is in city Y, what are some other cities that we can all fly to for N overlapping days at a minimum total cost?
public transit is actually a fairly small percentage of the way people get to and from airports. SF is one of the highest in the country though, I think around 22% of people use transit to get to and from the airport. However, on the opposite side is Cleveland with 5%.
Regardless, there are a lot of people who may be going to a suburb and not a hotel by the BART stop that don't want to do 3 transfers and would rather take a shuttle. Until a multimodal search engine can show me those options, I'm not really interested.
Speaking of pain points: I often have a X days and $Y00 free, and want to take a trip somewhere overseas without particularly caring where I go (though I do care about price). It would be incredibly convenient if there were a service that lists all international destinations for a given departure date, sorted by price. Approximating this manually is quite difficult.
You can use SkyScanner's Everywhere search, so look from London to "Everywhere" and you will get a list of destinations.
However, this was often the premise of these inspiration sites that didn't work out. Wanderfly has the ability to search by number of days and how much money you had to spend, but it didn't really work.
These things are good in concept, but it gets back to my point, that they need TONS of data to make any meaningful recommendations, and that data doesn't exist yet on travel. In many cases music is easier, as a former classical musician I can attest to this, in music theory there are diminished chords, augmented triads, all different types of existing classifications of different types of sound.
In travel it's a big mess. You need big data solutions to sort through the problems, and just building a pretty interface won't solve it, which is what most of these companies have been doing.
A number of sites do this to varying degrees of success:
- Skyscanner, as David says
- Adioso (YC W09)
- TripCommon - you can also set up alerts 'SF to Europe for less than $Y00'
- Getgoing (YC S12)
- Kayak explore
I've always found Skyscanner has the best results, but I'm curious to see how newcomer Getgoing compares.
The intersection of people interests and what places provide is an unsolved problem. The profile that says I am into X, Y, and Z and an app that can say what at place A or B is relevant is hard to come by. At least for me, it all involves direct searches.
That is mostly because the "degree of relevancy" is highly subjective in travel and is never constant as places adapt new tourism strategies, new things get built and open. Plus, if you think about it, most world's destinations have pretty much EVERYTHING in each category of travel, if you look hard enough. Sure, some things may receive greater focus but in the end you can find something to your fancy pretty much anywhere you go.
To contrast this with music, where a song will always stay the same and the 3 minutes of it are, arguably, easy to deconstruct into components, classify by genre/rhythm/artist/etc., and then index.
Disclaimer: we too are building a "trip planning tool" but I think we've found a good angle to approach the problem with to avoid the situation most "inspiration"/"social"/"planning" travel startups find themselves in.
IMO, the best way to make travel "social" is to make social travel easier, viz., make organizing trips for groups easier. That's a legitimate problem to solve.