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Be clever about costs before, during and after your travels
Added: (Tue Oct 13 2009)
A new travel start-up provides precise user-generated price information to allow travellers to budget upcoming trips. Exclusively cost-focused, travellers can calculate, manage and evaluate travel spend based on others’ actual, paid-for experiences through cost4travel.com.
Madrid (Spain), 10 October 2009 - On the whole, travellers are well served. Depending on the animal you are and what you want and where you want to go, you can - weather and wallet permitting - go ahead and do it. That’s nice. Travel companies that serve us are very happy to oblige, are quite good at what they do, and oh and yes: they charge us for it as well. So let’s look at costs in detail…yes, but where? Not that obvious.
True, we are wiser when we plan for our travel. Successful and reliable websites inform us of best or worst experiences. User-generated sites give us clues and advice and a lot of photos and videos. Other sites let us book when we have reviewed a dozen. The bigger industries, airlines for example, are also wise to unbundling offers and all in the name of empowering our travel decisions through so-called transparency.
But transparent, actual, paid-for costs? Where would you go in the name of budget planning? Where would you go to make a detailed evaluation of what your trip will, should and upon return, did cost you against your initial budget? A dedicated and user-generated cost travel reference site has just been launched: www.cost4travel.com.
cost4travel is designed to by-pass quoted prices and instead collects travellers’ actual costs during travel. It is designed to help us decide the best time of year to travel, to do clever budgeting and planning and designed to help us spend wisely.
Starting at the beginning, cost4travel is about getting travellers to share the prices paid for the services they used while travelling – flights, hotels and other accommodation, car hire, taxis, ferries, scooter rental, scuba dive and more. Once that information is uploaded all other travellers will be able to search this information to evaluate potential spend for their next trip.
Just imagine a travel calculator. The technology will store, organise and compute the pricing data inputted. The search feature will, using a number of parameters and business rules, show average, or highest or lowest price for particular travel services.
The information you want will be generated in currencies of your choice, and offer bar charts and graphs for clear reference to help you budget. You will be able to view cost history, i.e. the evolution of a service´s average price during the previous 12 months. The data supplied will include specific information on peak periods or low seasons adding context for travellers, as well as other travellers’ comments on experiences of services bought.
Simply put, cost4travel becomes the first and only user-driven cost-focused travel site for us to compare and contrast actual, real, paid-for costs. If you want consolidated information about costs ‘on the ground’ and ‘on-site’ and you want to know what’s realistic for a service that adds local colour to your trip without you paying sometimes abusive tourist prices – cost4travel can tell you what’s what.
This at least is what cost4travel will do - but I better add a quick note here to bring us back to earth. For this initial launch, the site relies on content first and foremost. Phase 1 is to feed in the data. The complete search modules can only be released when there is enough critical mass. Until then, the site still offers travellers the means to view specific trip and travel reports as data is initially inputted.
cost4travel is also making it easier for us to manage our own travel costs. Using “My Trips”, we can create virtual trips and assign the travel costs we feed in to these and obtain a complete picture of the costs of our latest trips.
In the future, travellers will be able to also create travel budgets, using cost4travel’s search engine, and contrast them with the real costs of your travel.
It is true that everything hinges on the site reaching its full potential – but will it? Here are some reasons why cost4travel founder Stéphane Pingaud believes it will.
1. Travel sites today are an essential part of travel planning and statistics prove it. According to a recent report in Travel Daily News, sixty-six percent (66%) of leisure travellers now use the Internet to plan some aspect of their travel (versus 35% in 2000). The key, says Pingaud, is that none of these travel sites focus exclusively on cost.
2. Travel is still big business: “A new itinerary” highlighted by the Economist back in 2008 showed how international arrivals reached 900 million in 2007 a 6% increase against 2006. Certainly figures are not so rosy today as travel is hit but the trend is set to continue when the economic situation is back on its feet. And, ultimately, we will always want to watch our costs as we travel.
3. Transparency is a key topic for the travel industry. The gold-rush for ancillary revenues that now makes airlines unbundle their offers only to add fees for almost everything else above and beyond the seat price, is actually confusing travellers and not helping travel vendors. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal by Scott McCartney* highlights this realisation by travel companies who are attempting to roll out tools for agencies and online vendors to “…lay bare hidden fees”. Good for them. And for us, cost4travel is offering that transparency to consumers directly.
4. Help bring down prices? cost4travel data will show certain traveller trends: what’s in and what’s out, always with the angle on cost. We may inadvertently be encouraging suppliers to offer better services. Pingaud continues, “…it may just be that our data will motivate travel operators to re-evaluate their costs and service…” Bringing down prices is an exaggeration but getting costs and offers that are more in line with our expectations would be a start.
5. Corporate travel management. Corporate travel managers or corporate-focused agencies will also have a way to really cross reference costs-paid against costs-quoted and ensure corporate customers stay in budget and are offered full and transparent cost data.
6.What’s in for me? Firstly, travellers’ contributions bring immediate rewards for themselves as much as for all other users of the site. From the outset, we are able to be smarter about our costs and budgeting before, during and after travel. Secondly, the mutual and community aspect of the site will drive data in the best interests of everybody with the added benefit of almost certainly influencing suppliers’ prices or offers.
cost4travel relies exclusively on the data travellers feed the site with, so start sharing now! The more data cost4travel receives the more relevant and helpful the site becomes to you and many other travellers around the world. And why not, it may be that your data will motivate travel operators to bring their prices down!
* The Wall Street Journal, February 09, “Airfare Quotes That Lay Bare Hidden Fees” by Scott McCartney