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Company Blog

April 13, 2009
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After several months of end-user testing, countless design cycles and many, many cases of Diet Mountain Dew and Red Bull, we are excited to bring you the totally redesigned, simpler yet more powerful, TravelMuse Planner.

 

The Planner still lets you organize all of your travel research into one central location, create an itinerary and involve your co-travelers in the planning process. But with this release, you also get new robust Mapping and Search Tools that enable you to quickly find and save the information you are looking for—be it articles on a given destination or specific places to sleep, eat and see. You can also now use proximity search to find nearby restaurants, hotels and attractions that are closest to a given location—and view search results plotted out on a map.

 

In addition, we’ve incorporate more than 2 million user ratings and reviews for hotels, restaurants and attractions from TravelMuse and other Web sites, including Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Travel and more.

 

Finally, we’ve introduced Customized Travel Guides. You can now create a personalized travel guide—on the fly—that is 100 percent personalized and contains all your important saved research, with maps, your schedule and a detailed city guide. You can build, share and print tailor-made travel guides to take on vacation at no charge.

 

This is our proudest day at TravelMuse yet. We’ve listened to our users, engaged them in the design process and released something that we think is market leading. We hope you agree.

 

Kevin & Eric

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In February, as the market was tanking, there was a lot of talk about 2009 being the year of the “Naycation”—aka the Lost Year, The Travel Nuclear Winter, etc.

 

Should this come to pass, it would be even worse than 2008, which was deemed the year of the “Staycation” by many, e.g., when people chose places close to home to visit for a day or a single over-night stay instead of really getting out on the road exploring.

 

We conducted a travel survey because we wanted to test this Pollyannaish theory. Turns out that the Naycation is just that—a theory. The majority of respondents to our survey were willing to make big sacrifices in other parts of their lives in order to KEEP traveling. People remain adamant about maintain their right to travel—so much so that many are willing to forego or cut back on other “luxuries,” like new clothes, fancy dinners or spa treatments.

 

This travel-fighting spirit and resilience needed a name; hence, the term “Yaycation” was born.

 

Armed with this simple understanding, we decided to empower people with a tool to help them identify ways to trim their spending in order to save some real dough for traveling—the Yaycations Calculator. It helps individuals see how much they’re spending on lattes, lunches and more, and identify where they can cut back.

 

They can then parlay that “found money” into trips to amazing destinations. Check it out, and let us know what you think. Where do you want to go today?

 

Kevin & Eric

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