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

I am really surprised that what is potentially the biggest breakthrough in inflight customer-facing technology since the overhead light - and a new revenue source, to boot - has been met with abject silence in the traditional and online media. Although kudos to Matt Lake at CNet for attempting to surface it.

FCC Auction 65, or the sale of bandwidth in the 800MHz radio telephone range, has the potential to change everything about the travel experience and make a bunch of people a lot of money, and yet nobody's talking about it. Why does it matter? Because this spectrum sale will pave the way to airborne WiFi in the USA.

Inflight internet isn't new. Lufthansa has led the way with what I believe is the biggest install of the Conexxion by Boeing service of airborne WiFi. Many other carriers offer it to a limited extent as well. In the past, I've even used Verizon's inflight dial-up in the US to access limited internet services. But did you know that no airline or provider can offer WiFi in the US because the bandwidth to operate it has not been made available by the FCC?

That's what this auction is about. And as opposed to the last go-round when those poor sucker cellphone providers spent jillions to put lonely little phones in the backs of people's seats, this time the winner seems likely to get some serious spoils. So far, the bids are up to US$38 million.

I can tell you having used the Lufthansa / Boeing service, it's pretty sweet. I watched streaming video, IM-ed, could have VOIP-ed if I wanted to, know people who have used Slingbox to watch their home TV channels over the Atlantic and in fact I even SMS-ed my wife when I learned that we would be landing in Newfoundland to deplane a sick passenger on board. Will the impact on flying in the US be immediate? No. Airlines - especially US airlines - are cheap and service additions aren't at the top of the To Do list. But massive change starts somewhere, and in my estimation a massive change in flying is starting with FCC Auction 65.

Thanks Phil for alerting me to this.

Tags: fccauction65, fcc, boeing, lufthansa, airborneinternet