Making travel even more rewarding
Added: (Tue Oct 13 2009)
Pressbox (Press Release) -
Travelling comes at a price. But exactly what price? A travel start-up dedicated to gathering, organising and analysing travellers’ costs – data inputted by users - is calculating the answer! By combining features and tools of today’s best social web networks cost4travel invents a way to make cost management and travel budgeting easy, interactive and attractive.
Madrid (Spain), 10 October 2009 - We travellers today have at our disposal a wide range of websites to post reviews of travel experiences, share tips and recommendations on preferred destinations and upload photos, videos and travel diaries. Those include TripAdvisor, IgoUgo, WAYN, zoomandgo, or real travel, to name but a few. But what happens if you want to examine really specific, detailed data – such as prices paid for a certain trip or travel service? The kind of data that may not be part of a site’s rating system or impossible to access through the search function?
Where can travellers investigate travel costs to find the best, worst, wrong or simply most realistic prices? Where can you manage your travel budget with finger-tip control before, after or while you’re travelling?
cost4travel is designed to answer these questions. We travellers (business or leisure), share the prices we have paid for services used during our latest trips – from flights, hotels to car hire, ferries, scuba dive and more. Once that information is uploaded, fellow travellers will be able to search this information to determine, plan and budget their next trip.
Essential to the site’s power – the success of the search engine especially - hinges on it receiving a significant mass of data. The task of getting users to fill-in price data needs to be made attractive somehow if the site is going to gather enough information. What will retain users who are asked to upload price information and ‘feed’ a maximum amount of cost-data to optimise the search engine? What will the site be able to do from the start while still acquiring decent data levels to fill the tank and oil the algorithms?
Owner and founder Stephane Pingaud explains: “cost4travel combines social networking tools with travel management functions from the moment you start. In other words, there’s enough of an incentive for all of us to keep feeding that data. Added to this, it’s also the only travel site dedicated exclusively to travel costs and I believe the benefit and potential of a ‘social search engine’ will encourage all cost-conscious travellers to see it succeed”.
In ‘My Trips’, users create an online copy of a particular trip by providing some core information, and then uploading the corresponding costs of travel services, from flights to accommodation to restaurants. ‘My Trips’ becomes your online carbon copy of the journey you are undertaking and accessing the site will let you organise, modify and amend aspects of your budget while on the move: an on-line and personal travel management tool.
Tools such as ‘My Alerts’ will update cost4travel’s members via email blasts on news on what costs have been uploaded for a particular round-trip or destination of your choice. Simply create an alert with cost4travel, highlighting the destinations and travel services you’re interested in, and cost4travel will send on a daily, weekly or monthly basis emails related to the requested information.
However, the real benefit to us as travellers will come when the site goes ‘social’, that is to say when the search engine sweeps a range of data to provide us with insights on the true cost of travel services, based on real data and experiences. The search feature will, using a number of parameters and business rules, show average, or highest or lowest price for travel services of choice, offer bar charts and graphs for clear reference, and use this information to build and budget your future trips.
Again, 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