Interesting about the only non-ticket seller being Tripadvisor, I didn't realise it was that skewed toward trips sales.
Being able to use the context of peoples existing plans and calendar/schedules to provide automated concierge type suggestions of what would suit them best in terms of travel (e.g flights, hotels etc)
Focused on B2B travel rather than vacations though for reasons others have put very well in here :)
To begin with though, we want to solve the problems inherent in calendaring/scheduling in the first place, and then build a technology platform from there that people can use to add context and automation to all sorts of use cases, travel being one of them.
Anyone interested in what we are doing would really appreciate feedback, good or bad :)
I think this is a good strategy since even a small population of traveling power-users who are keen on sharing their experiences can generate a lot of content and value for your site.
Here, that's a reason for having very low trust for travel planers. They want to bring you sideways. You're the product.
Once someone creates a self-hosted, WordPress-like, trip sharing software, I'd be all over it. Like my blog, I'd like to know that my time spent writing and uploading photos is going to last longer than the typical lifespan of a startup.
Based on what you said, you seem like the user we would target. Any feedback would be brilliant!
It's more about the "how" than the "what". If you have a general idea about what you want to do the trip planners give you unbiased advice on how to do it and save you maybe 3 or 4 weekends of trip planning
The big problem in travel is competence. It makes user (re) acquisition REALLY expensive and probably, as a startup, you can't afford it (an this mixed with no actual retention is painful). And why is it so expensive: because you cant compete with advertising, SEM or even SEO with big players out there with a LTV that multiplies yours by 10x. And actually, do a better job than you when we are talking about user satisfaction.
Airlines, big online travel agencies are really good at this and pay for a) Long tail SEM, b) content for being top SEO. Remember, Online Travel Agencies are technology companies with big resources. They are extremely good at SEO, at loyalty, at landing page optimization, at design, at customer service... their life is on it.
Think about this scenario:
User searches at google for "traveling to Vienna" (or even "travel planning vienna"). You know two things about that user: 1) He wants to plan his trip to Vienna (75% true) 2) He is going to buy cheap tickets to Vienna (95% true).
Big OTAs or Airlines know this, and what they do? They fake they are travel planners doing better (expensive) SEO than you as they know that user is going to buy the ticket at their site (that's 2$ per visit revenue)... because they do that extremely good. If they fail noone cares: User wont remember and at least they had brand awareness for their plane tickets.
Anyway, i think the problem is much simpler and applies at every industry: if you don't have a great retention (and this can be something not under your control, e.g. because what you are selling is needed twice a year) you have to be really good at user acquisition. And being good at user acquisition at a not-niche sector is extremely hard, no matter how good your product is. Probably you will have to focus first on what's your hack on getting users instead of at having a good product. Sad but true.
I've been reviewing Alexa's top travel sites for years hoping something changes... and its pretty discouraging: only 1 of top 25 sites not a ticket-seller: Tripadvisor (2nd). 4 in top 50, and all of them are super seo sites.
Google has been punishing not content sites for years, even being the best solutions. We've seen a lot of amazing ajax tools for almost every problem we could figure out... but if they were not seo compatible, everyone forgets them. I hope this changes in the future, e.g. mobile apps have another search scenario.