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

Want to plan a trip but don’t know how to get started? Too busy this summer to even pick a destination? Or maybe you’re just so worn down by all the economic doom and gloom that the last thing on your mind is putting your hard-earned discretionary income into a vacation.

Well, we feel your pain. Heck, we work at a start-up!

TravelMuse is a travel planning platform that supports you wherever you are in the planning cycle: from learning and education through detailed planning and booking. We’ve worked hard to pull together a set of tools and content that support the complete lifecycle of travel planning.

How to Plan Your Trip in Three Easy Steps

1.    Pick a destination. Try the Inspiration Finder. It allows you to quickly narrow your focus to destinations that are right for you—based on your preferences and needs.It’ll recommend up to eight destinations that fit your budget and desired activities and are within your maximum travel time and are good for the ages of travelers going.Fewer than eight results that meet your needs? Then you’ll get some alternative recommendations to consider that come close.

2.    Plan your travels. The TravelMuse Planner can help you organize your research once you’ve winnowed down the list to some really cool and interesting places. Use the “add to trip” action button on any TravelMuse article, hotel page, restaurant or attraction to instantly deposit your research into your appropriate trip plan. Share your trip plans with your travel companions and invite them to add items to your trips.

And of course it’s human nature to visit lots of sites as you plan your trip. You can use the TravelMuse Bookmarker to collect pages from anywhere on the web.

3.    Now you’re free to book your trip! TravelMuse includes a complete online reservation system to support all your air, car, hotel, cruise and package reservation needs. If you book elsewhere, you can easily add confirmations to your trip plans—so that everything is neatly stored in one central location.

One of the joys of travel is the anticipation of the trip. No matter where you are planning your vacation, chances are we have something new and insightful for you in our destination guides and articles. TravelMuse provides many ways to immerse yourself in your destination and enjoy some armchair travel before you even hit the road.

There you have it. Travel planning has never been easier, more beautiful or more fun.

Thanks and happy planning!

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.