Company Blog

The Best TravelMuse Yet

tmadmin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:40:35 GMT

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

User Feedback From Natasha, TravelMuse’s “Plan a Trip” Winner

tmadmin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:11:12 GMT

We were excited to receive thousands of entries for our recent “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” contest sponsored by Kimpton Hotels. We’ve now secured all of the prizewinners and would like to extend our congratulations to you all and thank Kimpton Hotels, Eye-Fi and Peter Greenberg for providing prizes!

When I reached out to our grand prize winner, Natasha F. from Vienna, PA, she was very excited to have won a two-night stay with Kimpton Hotels and $500 spending money. She went on to tell me about the trip she had planned on TravelMuse, which I wanted to share:

“Also, wanted to add that the TravelMuse Web site is one of my favorites. It was a great resource in planning our New England Road trip. I printed out the customized travel brochure and put into a binder. It contained all our notes and reservations for our trip (which was crucial since we drove over 1500 miles and needed to be very organized for the multiple stops). TravelMuse was great in finding places I would not have known to go to without being able to search. Two destinations I completely attribute to TravelMuse are Waterfire in Providence, RI and Purgatory Chasm in MA. Additionally, having everything in one place online made it accessible to me at work and at home.

I plan on using TravelMuse for all my trips, especially road trips.”

I don’t think we could have picked a better winner if we’d tried, as Natasha fully mastered the planning tools on TravelMuse. She gladly agreed to talk to me by phone last Friday to provide more feedback on her experience.

Natasha explained that her primary motivation for taking her trip was that her husband wanted to eat lobster, and she wanted to go white-water rafting and visit Cape Cod. Apart from that, everything else was fair game.

What she liked about TravelMuse
Natasha had a lot of good things to share about planning a trip on TravelMuse:

•    Destination guide-style intros gave her some background on places.
•    Top bookmarked activities by other TravelMuse members provided helpful suggestions.
•    Articles about activities and events influenced a change in her itinerary to take in the first bonfire of the season at Waterfire.
•    TravelMuse Bookmarker made it easy to add any Web page to her trip.
•    Ability to edit and add scheduled details (e.g., bed and breakfast confirmations) kept everything in one place, making it easy to find.
•    The free custom pdf guide with all her trip information, maps and notes became her bible for her road trip.

What she thought we could improve on TravelMuse
Natasha didn’t have too many problems with TravelMuse:

• Scheduling items became more difficult with a full Tripfolio and a packed schedule for a 10–day itinerary, as it was hard to drag and drop items far down the page. [This is a great piece of feedback and we are looking at how we can make this easier to use.]
• A couple of great suggestions… [Sorry, I’m not going to post these gems. You’ll just have to watch this space!]

Natasha plans to use her “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” prize to plan a California wine country road trip.

Thanks Natasha for being a very well-deserved winner and for sharing some great user feedback with the TravelMuse team!

The TravelMuse Planner 2.0—Better, Faster, Easier

tmadmin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:05:46 GMT

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

TravelMuse Releases First Trip Planning Widget for Bloggers; Introduces Crowd Sourcing

tmadmin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:38:59 GMT

At the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit, Hollywood, Calif. We’re excited to be making a couple of new announcements.

1. Plan-It! Widget for Bloggers

Bloggers can add the Plan-It! widget to individual blog posts, enabling their followers to save and share relevant content within the TravelMuse Planner.

The Plan-It! widget provides a solution to help travelers easily collect and centralize their research—while also increasing visibility for bloggers. Blogs that feature the Plan-It! social bookmarking widget allow visitors to quickly save content from the blog by simply clicking the Plan-It! button on any page. The content is then stored directly into the TravelMuse Planner—a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research. Within the Planner, individuals can easily create trip plans and share the research they’ve collected with friends, family and fellow travelers—driving more traffic back to the blog postings they’ve saved. Bloggers can visits Plan-It! for Bloggers to find out more and easily add the Plan-It! button.

Sites using Plan-It include: UpTake, Ciao Bambino, Compulsive Traveler and TravelingMamas.

2. Crowd Sourcing

This new feature provides insights into the hottest travel destinations and topics on the Web. As individuals save content into their TravelMuse Planner from TravelMuse.com and from around the Web, lists of most popular destinations and topics are generated and dynamically updated based on trip-planning behavior—view this example destination page for Barcelona to see popular bookmarks. By capturing the actions of crowds, TravelMuse can provide valuable insight reflecting the interests of travelers in real time.

See TravelMuse at the PhoCusWright Conference on stage at 10:16 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 17, or visit us at our table on Monday or Tuesday in the Laurel-Doheny rooms.

For full details click here.