PlanMy.Travel wants to solve travel planning woes with human expertise | Hacker News Reader

PlanMy.Travel wants to solve travel planning woes with human expertise

tnooz.com

23 pointsAarvay24 comments

I used to go to travel agents, and loved the speed at which they could construct the most complex of itineraries but disliked the inconvenience of visiting their building at their convenience (9am-5:30pm Mon-Sat) and the lack of specialist knowledge about the place I was visiting.

Then I tried specialist tours, and loved everything except the control over the itinerary once there.

Then came the internet and it made the convenience work, and it allowed us to built our own complex itineraries. But now we faced hours of research to find what is worth visiting, and what isn't.

Recently I moved back to travel agents but now favour specialist ones.

Specifically, I use companies like this: http://www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk/ where every member of staff have lived or visited the destinations they serve.

I go in, sit down, and if I ask about Chile and the person in front of me hasn't been they go fetch a couple of people who have been.

I guess my question is: Have you just invented the specialist travel agent "on the internet" and "with the crowd"? For how is this different from anything that anyone could've done already?

That cynicism aside, I do think there's a big potential in being the gateway to such specialism as it can be hard to find the best agents for a given place.

>> Have you just invented the specialist travel agent "on the internet" and "with the crowd"? For how is this different from anything that anyone could've done already?

It's not. We're just making them more accessible, easily discoverable, and leveraging the power of an open marketplace so the best ones can thrive. We're also giving them collaboration tools (think of it like a google docs for trip planning) to help them give structured and organized advice.

> For how is this different from anything that anyone could've done already?

You might want to rephrase that, because that could be asked of anything and the answer would always be nothing.

Google was nothing different from anything anyone could've done. But they did it, and nobody else did.

Nobody else has done this (well) yet.

http://www.voyando.com is in a similar space but with a different proposition (less focused on info, more on the transaction).

It's in private beta atm.

Not sure how big the market would be. I feel that a lot of people can get enough "knowledge" from http://wikitravel.org/

Wikitravel is a great tool (so are many of the other content sites like lonelyplanet, frommers, etc) for those who don't mind plowing through dozens of sites to get the information they need and then putting it all together.

We believe that the market for seeking out expertise is pretty big though. Do check out recent news about Vayable's pivot into a similar space.

Better to use http://wikivoyage.org/ than wikitravel. It's a fork after there were some complaints about the owners of Wikitravel.

What happend? Is the content the same?

Like any fork, the content was the same at the time of the fork. Obviously the content is no longer the same.

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Wikivoyage_and_Wiki...

A bit off topic, but this is the first site I've seen to the use the .travel extension in quite some time.

Why not just pick up the planmytravel.com?

Short answer: because it's taken and expensive.

Long answer: http://blog.planmy.travel/post/61015163485/planmy-dot-what

The page broke and was stuck at /index.php when I tried to ask a question. Come on folks! I wouldn't want to type out my whole query again.

Ouch, sorry :(

We are in beta and this is the sort of feedback that's really useful. We'll be fixing the flow so that we ask the user to sign in before they enter the question - that way its less likely to cause this problem. Sorry again about that.

No problem. All the best!

Hey! First, Great idea! Quite impressed by it. How do you guys differentiate from other players?

Thanks Ashwin. So the main thing that differentiates us from other players is the philosophy that we have towards travel planning which we summarised in one of our blog posts: http://blog.planmy.travel/post/65971193858/what-do-instant-c...

Awesome! Excited to check out your new product!

Hi Ashwin, I'm the founder of PlanMy.Travel. And the answer to your question will greatly depend on which "other players" you're referring to.

other players could be MyGola.com

Please see my comment on the linked article for my take on Mygola.

or https://miavia.in/

We're not competing with every travel planning site out there. I can only point out differentiators with those that are offering anything similar (i.e. an expert network). Asking a ketchup maker how they're different from mustard is kind of pointless.

really like the idea. good stuff guys!

just want to know how do I choose who is a good travel planner? for example if her profile states she is a food + wine expert, can I get a glimpse of how does she think about them? like links to their blog posts etc?

A travel planner's profile has a "Blog" tab where they post their travel experiences, tips, etc. This is mainly meant for showcasing their travel style and preferences so users can understand them better.

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