Stuart MacDonald :: UPDATED: TripHub: Think Evite meets Hotels.com, but don't expect "group travel"

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UPDATED: TripHub: Think Evite meets Hotels.com, but don't expect "group travel"

by Stuart MacDonald on Mon 26 Jun 2006 11:26 PM EDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos

TripHub As I mentioned here, TripHub is a new Seattle-based online travel startup which includes some former Expedia colleagues of mine, and at least one Expedia + msn Travel Channel veteran. Off the top, I offer kudos to all of them for tackling something new, and extra kudos for taking on the very difficult task of helping people manage the tremendously ungainly world of group travel.

As you might take from the last sentence, I went into my tire kick of the site with fairly low expectations. Not because these aren't bright folks, but because group travel is really hard to do. As it turns out, my expectations were probably well placed - at least partially. This is a pretty good invitations-and-central-repository-like-Evite meets private-label-Hotels.com site, but as a real group travel management tool, they still fall short.

Now, the Evite-esque invitation and central trip record thing is a cool tool. If you have ever used Evite to invite people to a party or event, you can probably imagine applying that concept to multi-person trip planning. Pretty handy. And, they have a private label deal with the Hotels.com/TravelNow crew (all part of the Expedia group of companies) and Viator for activities, which from a revenue perspective should drive affiliate revenue for them. But, from a user perspective, beyond the Evite-esque thing, they don't seem to offer much in terms of true group travel planning assistance.

What do I mean by that? Well, "group travel" is really about people going as a group of more than X people (depending on the supplier) and saving money. Fact is, this functionality is very, very hard to offer online. There are a lot of reasons for that which I won't go into, but more to the point, it does not seem that TripHub has pushed that envelope any further.

To their credit, they do link to group request pages on various supplier sites, as well as promoting "featured links" to these types of pages, so and it looks like they are likely getting some kind of payment for the referral and ad revenue for the features, which is good for them in terms of revenue. But short of aggregating the links, there's little user value there.

The flight search is nothing special - it's a straight-up pass through to the TravelNow IAN platform, and only searches for a maximum of 6 passengers (there's one of those hard group travel planning problems - this is a limitation imposed by the CRS). For true "group" deals, you have to go to the airline's own group booking sites, and then input the details back into TripHub manually. Likewise for the hotel portion: there is certainly no new ground being broken in terms of the search functionality itself (eg: there is no meta search or breakthrough-anything here; it's just vanilla private label Hotels.com). In fact, TripHub offers nothing which makes hotel seeking "groups" easier to book or price multiple rooms at once.

Net/net: while the Evite-esque feature is pretty neat-o, as a real travel planning service and aid to group travel, TripHub doesn't get the job done.

Update: I had a chat with Michael McGinn, TripHub's CFO and Operations guy this afternoon. Michael also happens to be a former colleague, a former Expedia Strategic Planning VP and long time air industry guy. He's also one smart cookie to boot. Michael talked with me about their desire to use solving the problem of people travelling together as a way to get people to keep coming back and build an ongoing audience for advertisers. He stressed that the traditional travel industry idea of "group travel" being about deals is not at the core of what they are offering, and I have to agree that making the prospect of "going together" easier is a good good one. As I said above.

All that said, and with great respect to Michael and the team, I still can't imagine that what they have today is where they are going to end up. It just shouldn't be. Group travel is a big business, and making it truly better in a big way is a nice, chewy, defensible objective. My hope is that, regardless of what they are saying at this point, they do have cracking that big problem as the ultimate goal. Now *that* would be cool.

Tags: triphub

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Comments

Re: TripHub: Think Evite meets Hotels.com, but don't expect "group travel"

by John on Tue 27 Jun 2006 08:22 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Hi Stuart - I'm VP Marketing for TripHub (http://www.triphub.com). Thanks for taking a look at our service. We agree that planning trips with others is a difficult task (it's been compared to a mouth full of thumb tacks!) and we embrace this "Travel 2.0" challenge!

There are a couple things your readers might be interested in. First, we are re-defining "group travel". We consider the definition "X number of people going as a group and saving money" as directly indicative of why the industry (including suppliers and online travel agents) is not meeting many real customer needs. There are a massive number of trips every year where fewer than X people may travel and/or more than X may meet at a destination but may travel separately. For example, a family reunion of 14 people may originate from 3 different cities or at different times from the same city. And if 7 stay at one hotel, 7 at another... group rates are not likely available. But they are clearly a group! And they have very real needs beyond shopping and buying. They need to coordinate who is coming, schedules and itineraries, events, roommates, money owed, etc. This is where we're focused.

Second, as you know, "group deals" can be quite elusive. In many cases, groups pay even more than individual buyers. There are many factors (supplier, seasonality, yield management, etc) but we do know that just getting X people together does not automatically entitle one to discounts (though most consumers mistakenly think this is the case).

Third, we recognize that consumers shop across multiple travel sites and will often buy at their favorite OTA or directly at supplier sites. We are not trying to change that. Instead, we want to facilitate the sharing of itineraries regardless of where they buy. Admittedly, the manual entry of details can and will be simplified through technological innovations. But a very high percentage of TripHub customers use the manual feature "as is" today. So the need is clearly there.

I could go on (!). The summary is, we do not pretend to be the best place to get deals on group rates. But we are trying to address the multitude of pain points people encounter outside the core shopping and buying experience. And we'll do this for millions of "groups" that are currently being ignored by the industry.

This is a great and healthy dialogue and I welcome your thoughts and the thoughts of your readers. We have a long way to go and are listening and innovating as fast as we can.

We'll continue to watch your blog with interest and wish you and everyone happy travels!

Re: TripHub: Think Evite meets Hotels.com, but don't expect "group travel"

by Stuart MacDonald on Tue 27 Jun 2006 09:40 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thanks, John. How've you been since I last ran into you in RedWest? Busy, it seems :-)

As I mentioned, the Evite-y part of TripHub is handy - no doubt. Corralling multiple travellers is brutal on its' own, and fixing that is a real need. But, I do think that if you don't somehow really enable trip creation - from search through to booking, for multiple people and including the facilitation of group deals - you will have a real challenge to build a full business on top of that Evite-y feature alone. I mean, even on its' own Evite is handy but it hasn't been a huge financial winner, from what I have heard.

I also think that part of why you are downplaying the fact that you don't really do the group deal thing might be because you'd like to be doing more, but can't - at least not yet. Otherwise, why have the links to to supplier group booking tools? And the "featured suppliers"? Not to mention that Suppliers usually love to get group business. My gut says you are hoping to offer more along these in future releases...

Re: TripHub: Think Evite meets Hotels.com, but don't expect "group travel"

by John on Wed 28 Jun 2006 12:29 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

You have a good gut Stuart ;-) We have many things in the pipeline and encourage everyone to keep an eye on TripHub.

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