Trivago: interview with Ulrike Pithan (P&R manager)
March 13, 2008
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During my trip to ITB Berlin and the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit, I meet Ulrike Pithan (P&R manager for Trivago).
She give us some informations about Trivago and their new service for hoteliers: trivago hotelier
>Ulrike, can you tell some information about you and Trivago?
Trivago was founded in 2005 by Rolf Schrömgens, Malte Siewert and Peter Vinnemeier. Their concept was to create a site where travellers can find all the information they need to plan their trips and share their travel experiences with others. Over the years trivago has developed a 45,000 strong European-wide community. Apart from travel reports, guides, tips and reviews trivago offers an extensive hotel price search engine which enables travelers to find ideal accommodation at the lowest available rate in 265,000 hotels worldwide. I joined the trivago team about a year ago and am very happy and excited to work in an international young team of 21 employees where new ideas are always welcome.
>Can you give us some highlights and stats about Trivago and the Trivago travel community!
The site currently stores 150,000 hotel reviews, 1.6 million photos and information on 50,000 tourist attractions, generating 2.5 million visits and over 10 million page views a month. The trivago community is involved in the content management of the site: it takes over administrative functions, sets up criteria for the content gathered on trivago and it engages in its own projects, like the collection of geographical data on trivago. As a member on trivago your level of responsibility rises with your amount of activivity and your level of experience.
> Tourism is a people business and a destination experience with personal encounters. Do you think the community can leverage a destination or a product thanks a web site and tools like Trivago?
Absolutely. trivago offers independent travel information and first-hand experience to travellers which will, of course, influence their travel decisions. You get the whole range of information about a hotel or destination on trivago: reviews, travel guides, pictures, the hotel’s catalogue text and reviews of external sources, all gathered by the community. Interestingly tourist offices have realised the influence of travel portals like trivago on regional tourism and have started recommending trivago to their customers.
>For community travel and hotel user reviews, do you feel something is different between the european customers and countries.
The trivago community regards itself as international. Members of trivago communicate cross-nationally with each other and discuss ideas on trivago. It’s rather the concept of trivago that unites them than their nationality. In our regular international online surveys we are always suprised though about the divergent results. These reviews often show how national tastes for travel can differ. Our most recent survey on holiday sicknesses revealed that only a third of British and French travellers feel fine while on holidays and that the French suffer most from depressions on holiday.
> Some news about Trivago for France market?
Trivago France recently launched our new service for hoteliers: trivago hotelier (www.hotelier.trivago.fr or www.hotelier.trivago.com). With this service we want to give hoteliers the possibility to react to hotel reviews, to state their own point of view and get into contact with guests. Hoteliers can write about news and offers in their hotel blog, upload as many pictures as they like and manage the information about their hotel on trivago.
Thanks Ulrike.
My thoughts: very intelligent move this service for hoteliers.
I guess they will love it compare the TripAdvisor process 
If you want to dowload the Trivago french presentation for hotelier, Download file“>it’s here (sorry in french)
Isango
March 5, 2008
Ranjan Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Isango!
Mr. Singh joined online travel with Expedia and then become Managing Director for EBookers. What he found is that companies like Expedia and other OTAs are focused on the logistics of travel versus the destination products or the reasons why people go on trips. A recent survey stated that 66% of search is for things to do and attractions. For end consumers, there are many choices for booking the logistical pieces of travel but there are very few choices for the attraction and thing to do products. Therefore, a consolidation model works very well for this space and it is for this reason that Isango was created.
The reason for Isango’s growing success is based on the increase in broadband proliferation, a desire to consolidate product, and the rise in experiential travel. Isango provided a distribution model that allows partners to monetize their existing traffic.
A big question for me is how is Isango! different than Viator, which already has very strong penetration in the things to do market? Unfortunately I didn’t get to ask this question but if anyone else can provide their comments on this question, that would be great.
Mobile Travel Technologies - Gerry Samuels
March 5, 2008
Gerry Samuels, Founder & Executive Director, Mobile Travel Technologies Ltd.
Who are MTT’s customers?
Hotels, airlines, and intermediaries. Their core technology enables certain aspects of the customer’s mobile services. The technology can do things like deliver travel information, select seats, and even have boarding passes sent to the phone. The technology connects on the back-end with the customer systems and cherry pick the information that needs to be delivered and modifies or smart edits the information in order to be viewed on both high-end users and basic mobile devices.
Do companies need to change their websites in order to support mobile moving forward?
Yes, because the activities that mobile users do on their mobile devices is different then what they do on their PCs. It is expected that there will be 500 million mobile users by the end of the year. In many markets like India and China, mobile is the internet. In these markets there is a significant opportunity to utilize the mobile web services for transactional services.
Mobile Commerce is actually more advanced in India then they are in Europe and North America primarily because of the lack of use of credit cards in these markets.
What is the opportunity?
Mobile travel services are still primarily used by business services. We are at the point where we are looking at delivering very light travel information versus the multi-media downloads that would be provided to a more leisure market. The opportunity is delivering important key travel services that can be used and are valuable now versus trying to deliver products and services that are not well supported.
YourTour’s trip engine technology: exclusif interview
March 4, 2008
Decizium team launches their “YourTour’s trip engine technology” , a new step for the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
They have a stand at ITB (hall 6.1, stand 141). I suggest you contact them and make a appointment and business!
Emmanuel Guisset tell us more about Decizium and the YourTour technology.
> Emmanuel, can you tell some information about you and the Decizium team.
Well, Decizium started in 2005 after 10 years of R&D in collaboration with the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons. Last year, we received some private and public investments and since then we’ve been working on improving our technology, business development and creating a B2C website.
As far I am concerned, after receiving my international business degree, I traveled quite a lot and completed a few internships abroad until Decizium allowed me to stay in the travel world and be part of a new exciting challenge: changing the way Internet users buy travel packages.
Currently, Decizium, located in Belgium employs a young international team of 10.
>Can you give us some outline about your goals with YOUR TOUR!
We have spent years developing our YourTour system, under which it is no longer necessary for tourists to make a trade-off between a tailor-made holiday where he/she might need to wait days before obtaining a first trip proposition, and a pre-packaged offer that is not tuned to his/her wishes but that is immediately available. The system makes possible what seemed to be impossible: the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
YourTour’s trip engine technology allows travel companies to go much further than the currently available packaging solutions by taking into account the appropriate on-site activities for the tourist and automatically arranging it all (transportation, accommodations and activities) in a coherent way, using multiple criteria.
This results in a comprehensive and detailed travel itinerary, accommodating the restrictions imposed by the tourist (trip duration, areas to visit, travel budget, etc.) and respecting the tourist’s compromise between the various costs (for transportation, accommodations and activities) and the appeal of the trip (quality of the activities, hotel comfort level, etc.).
In addition, we are currently developing a B2C website that will allow tourists to build and book their customized self drive trip in France in a few clicks. Indeed, we feel it was necessary to have something online to reach better the B2B market. You’ll have to wait until it’s online to learn more…
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