Today, I’m announcing my departure from TravelMuse.  Russ Lemelin is assuming the CEO post but I will remain actively involved as a member of the board of directors.   Companies go through different stages from concept to scale.  I’m proud to have led TravelMuse from its founding on PowerPoint in April 2007 to segment leader with millions of visits a year.

Russ has the skills to help the company advance to its next stage -- focused on growth and profitability.   Prior to joining TravelMuse in 2008 as CFO, Russ was interim-CEO and CFO at Sidestep, which was acquired by Kayak in December 2007.  (Russ can be reached at russ(at)travelmuse(dot)com)

The last 2 ½ years have been a great ride for me as CEO and co-founder of TravelMuse.  The experience of building a company, a team, and a solution from scratch and seeing that solution so warmly received by the market has been extraordinarily gratifying.  The opportunity to collaborate with consumers, partners, suppliers, analysts, and investors has been extraordinary.  TravelMuse has helped shape the future of online travel, and I’d like to think, set the bar for travel inspiration and planning. 

As a founder and entrepreneur it’s impossible to sit back and say ‘we’re done’. But TravelMuse has come a long way, and the road ahead for the company and the industry is bright.  This just in:  TravelMuse was named the Executive Editor’s Pick for travel advice in this month’s Travel & Leisure!

Wishing you all a great journey in work and life!

Kind regards,

Kevin

If you wish to contact me, my email address is: kevin(dot)fliess(at)gmail(dot)com

Today, I am delighted to announce the latest release of the TravelMuse Planner. (From the TravelMuse homepage, just type in where you want to go to try it out.) This is the most advanced yet intuitive trip planning solution on the Web and we’re really excited to share it with you! Our goals for this release were to:

1. Make the overall process of trip planning on TravelMuse even easier and more fun.
2. Make it simpler for you to find and save relevant content—both on TravelMuse and from anywhere on the Web.
3. Create a forum for TravelMuse users to share information about the Web site and the trip planning process.

Here’s a quick rundown on the key features:

A Tripfolio That Follows You Everywhere

The Tripfolio is your virtual manila folder—a central storage container for all your travel research. It’s the place where you save anything that interests you while planning your trip. You’ll notice that the Tripfolio is now bound to the right side of the site and is present when you are using the TravelMuse Planner.

Above: When you begin a trip, your Tripfolio is empty. As you save research, it appears in your Tripfolio.

Above: Tripfolio with saved research items.

New! Embedded Web Search

It’s no longer acceptable for travel Web sites to exist as walled gardens. Consumers naturally visit multiple Web sites when planning a trip, but struggle to organize all that information.

Now, with embedded Web search, users can explore the Web and save any interesting Web pages directly to their trip plan without leaving TravelMuse—no more managing multiple windows or endless bookmarking, and no more e-mailing links back and forth to your friends while planning a vacation.

It doesn’t matter what kind of page it is: A hotel review, an article, a blog post—all of them can be saved and stored centrally. Now, co-travelers can save all of their favorite research in the same place.

TravelMuse is the first travel Web site to harness the power of the Web in this way.

The screenshot below illustrates how TravelMuse has integrated embedded Web search into the trip planning experience. Note that there are two tabs at the top of the page; one tab provides access to TravelMuse’s own great content. The second tab lets you explore the Web using embedded Web search. The power of this integrated experience is that you can save both TravelMuse content with Web content to a single place—the Tripfolio.

New! Community Forums

Have a question about TravelMuse or a great idea for a new feature? On the new community forum you can connect with other TravelMuse users and communicate with the TravelMuse product team. It’s your go-to location for product help and idea exchange.
We hope you like this new release as much as we do. As always, please send us your ideas and feedback so that we can continue to improve the TravelMuse experience.

One last thing: With this release, we are also refocusing our content development around the planning process. What this means is that you’ll see fewer general articles and more bite-sized pearls of wisdom specifically designed to make your trip planning experience better. Leading our content development efforts is Jill K. Robinson, who assumes the role of Managing Editor. Over the coming months, you’ll see new content emerge on the site such as destination ratings, recommended trips and thousands of activity descriptions in hundreds of destinations.

Happy travels!
Kevin and the TravelMuse Team

We’re excited to announce that TravelMuse has been selected to present at the Travel Innovation Summit taking place at the 2008 PhoCusWright Conference on Nov. 17 in Hollywood, Calif.

Approximately 20 of the leading travel start-ups will have 10 minutes each to showcase their solutions on stage in front of members of the press, investors and leaders from around the travel industry. If you’re in Los Angeles and would like to meet with us, grab a pass and head on over to the conference! It should be a great show.

It was a whirlwind two days for TravelMuse at Fall DEMO'08 in San Diego on Sept. 8 and 9!

The experience was amazing and even surpassed the high expectations we had going in. Let’s be clear about this. DEMO is the real deal. I recommend it for any start-up.

The DEMO team is an A+ outfit. They make sure that everything goes smoothly, and as one demonstrator said, they make you feel like the only company at DEMO. The organization is meticulous from pre-event planning to the ongoing relationship management with DEMO alumni.

TravelMuse got great coverage by the press in attendance, and the show definitely stirred the interest of the investor and partner community as well.

I’d like to thank the TravelMuse team and the families of the team for enduring some very long days and nights over the past few months. You rose to the occasion time and again, and the results speak for themselves! Gracias!

Here are a few pictures from the show. We were honored to be a part of it!

Taking the stage....

Fiona does her best roadie impersonation...

Eric goes vertical on the monitors...

Within the last week, we completed a major upgrade to our hotel and destination database to ensure the most current and freshest content possible. Having a body of accurate and actionable reference content is essential for effective travel planning and booking, and we’re committed to keeping this information as up to date as possible.

Working with our booking partner World Choice Travel (a subsidiary of Travelocity), we increased our hotel count to 105,000—up from about 90,000. These 105,000 hotels cover more than 17,000 destinations and provide the widest selection of trusted hotel options throughout the world. Our hotel pages connect directly to the central reservation systems of hotels worldwide, which results in better rate and room descriptions, and in many cases, a greater variety of rates. 

Working with our destination content provider WCities, we increased the number of points of interest (restaurants, shopping and attractions) from roughly 85,000 to 92,000 covering over 200 destinations.  

Obviously, with this amount of data, there will be bits of obsolete or wrong information. We work closely with both partners to report and fix any data inaccuracies and you can let us know of anything you find by sending an e-mail to: feedback@travelmuse.com.

With the ongoing credit crisis, rising inflation and a weakening dollar, taking that much-deserved vacation might seem tough to do this year. But fear not! For discerning travelers, there are still some great deals to be had and plenty of ways to stretch your dollar. Here are the top 10 tips for getting the most out of your vacation buck in 2008.

1. Seek out off-peak periods. The best deals tend to fall right after Labor Day. Yes, the kids will miss some school, but you’ll save a ton of dough.

2. If you plan to travel internationally, seek out places where the dollar is still comparatively strong. Argentina, South Africa, Thailand, and Costa Rica are a few of the places where the greenback still has a lot of power. 

3. Buy a vacation package. Combining hotel and air reservations often yields a lower price than a la carte purchases.

4. Travel with another family. Sharing the cost of gas, food and rental car is a great way to keep expenses in check.

5. Rent a house and cook your meals. Dining out every day can quickly add up to what you paid for your flight or more! If you rent a home or condo, you can prepare many of your own meals—and you get a ton of other benefits like more space and more privacy, often at a fraction of the cost of a luxury hotel. Sites like Rooster.com are great places to find vacation rentals.

6. Go abroad at Thanksgiving. When everyone else is jockeying to get to Aunt Rose’s place in Milwaukee, you can avoid the madness and find some great deals overseas.

7. When exchanging currency, use a bank instead of your hotel. Hotels charge some of the highest processing fees of any institution.

8. On road trips, make sure your tires are properly inflated and get a tune up before you go. You’ll get better gas mileage with tires that are properly inflated and you reduce the risk of emergency repairs if you have your car serviced in advance.

9. Consider voluntourism or a service trip. These trips are very affordable since a good portion of your cost is covered in exchange for the service you provide. The Sierra Club has been running service trips for decades—leading groups of people into some of the world’s most beautiful places, while giving back to the planet at the same time.

10. Book now. If you know you’re going to travel this summer or fall, you should lock in rates as soon as possible. With fuel costs expected to rise throughout the summer, air fare and hotel rates are likely to increase as well.

And always keep an eye out for deals. TravelMuse works to uncover great vacation bargains each week. You can read about them in our Travel News section. By registering at TravelMuse.com, you will automatically receive our weekly newsletter.

For the majority of people in the United States, the process of online travel booking is a pretty familiar experience by now. It’s probably right up there with buying books on Amazon or searching for information via Google. 

It turns out that online travel is in fact the most mature and largest single e-commerce category. More than $90,000,000,000 (that’s 90 billion dollars) in travel transactions are done online every year—in the United States alone. And the market is still growing—with growth greater than 50 percent (year over year) seen in emerging dominant economies like China, India, and Brazil.

So if online travel has become commonplace, and Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline have become household names, why is there such a boom in travel start-ups right now? What problems are they trying to solve? How do they hope to compete?

Look no further than TripAdvisor, the newest household name on the block. TripAdvisor recognized a great opportunity and filled a huge void that was unmet by the large online travel agencies — people want hotel reviews from real people.  Is it really surprising that people are nearly twice as likely to trust user reviews than what the hotel says about their rooms?  (TripAdvisor now has 10 million reviews and has become such a hot phenomenon, that some hotels have taken to posting favorable reviews of themselves; so make sure you read between the lines.)

So this current groundswell in travel start-ups (which some have dubbed travel 2.0) is a direct response to the identification of a whole host of other niches and voids that have yet to be filled in the space. And the acceleration of innovation over the last 12-18 months is largely attributable to the decreasing cost of technology and simply a function of the Web itself. Data is everywhere (but useful information is scarce), software frameworks have gotten inexpensive and it doesn’t take as much money or as many people to kick-start a new venture. That said, I have a sense that we are seeing a bit of a travel 2.0 bubble with something of a “build it and they will come” philosophy.

As one of the new entrants in this space, we’re trying torestrain ourselves and stay focused—building a great travel planning product and authoring interesting and helpful content. Here are the key issues we see and are focused on:

• Booking is the last 5 percent of the online travel process. The 95 percent that comes before it is where all the

heavy lifting happens. What people want is help in getting ideas of where to travel and what to do. Hence, our investment in editorial content that is vetted, fact-checked and written by local experts and journalists.

• Not everyone who visits your Web site wants the same thing. Relevancy is essential and we’re focusing on family travelers first. We want to make sure that if you’re a family traveler, our insight and information is helpful to you.

• Planning a trip online can be taxing. We think it should be fun and easy. That’s why we’re so jazzed about the TravelMuse Planner which is currently in private beta, but will be broadly available this summer.

While these are the key issues that we’re focused on, there are many more opportunities out there. We’re excited to see what some of our peers are up to like the guys at UpTake who are making it simple to quickly search thousands of content sites to find information relevant to families.

Travel is a space that is constantly re-defining itself and there are many unmet needs still to be addressed.  I agree with Yen Lee at Uptake, that online travel is nowhere near "done". 

What do you think the big opportunities are? Or for that matter, the nagging little splinters that should get fixed?

We want to hear from you.