Can trip planning startups ever succeed?

The trip planner pitch
has been around for a while now. It starts with “Travel is broken, the average
consumer has to use 36 websites to plan a trip.”

The solution is to
create a super-platform to do all travel research, bookings, sharing and
management in one place.

The go-to-market
strategy used to be content marketing and SEO, but now involves mostly
peer-to-peer sharing and influencers on social networks.

But up to now, trip
planners have always failed.

There were many problems
with the proposed solution:

• Content. Gathering and organizing the information required makes it
  really difficult and expensive to build. You need breadth and depth of global
  destination content, and it needs to be current, and wherever relevant, it
  needs to be bookable.
• Users and loyalty. Once you’ve built it, how
  are you going to find users? And assuming you have the answer to this, how are
  you going to keep them so you don’t have to pay Google each time? Lack of
  frequency of travel for the vast majority of humans is the enemy here, as it is
  for almost every travel company on the planet.
• Product. Does your product work? Can you
  overcome the learning curve for new users? Consumers are pretty
  comfortable with Google, and the major online travel agencies mostly have an excellent user
  experience and aren’t really broken, at least when it comes to flights and
  hotels. 
• Revenue. Assuming it works, and users keep coming
  back, can you monetize that traffic? Trip-planners are normally positioned at
  the top of the funnel, before transactions are happening.

It’s different this time

• Content. With the launch
  of ChatGPT in 2022, the barriers to entry here were eliminated. Any generative artificial intelligence-connected website now has access to the world’s travel content. With little
  development, that content can be triangulated with sources like Google Places,
  to make sure it’s current and relevant. You could even argue that when it comes
  to content, the largest travel companies in the world have lost 100% of their
  previous advantage. This content is also searchable without the need for
  complex algorithms or categorization. 
• Users. There’s a much
  bigger target market of consumers comfortable transacting online these days.
  But the size of the market was never the key factor, and aside from that,
  nothing has really changed here. When it comes to retention, there’s certainly
  more willingness to use apps these days, but you still need to get people to
  your app in the first place. Gamification is easier to create in modern tech
  platforms, which could be one of the solutions. Ultimately though, the problem
  is as large as it ever was.
• Product. When it comes
  to development, everything is easier and more accessible now. Easy and
  inexpensive cloud hosting, access to better application programming interfaces (APIs) on both the content side and
  the bookings side, and just better tools all around to improve efficiency and
  the final product. Personalization can also be done now, and without the need for any previous
  customer booking data. This allows personalization that actually works, which
  has never happened before in travel.
  Many argue that a lot of consumers enjoy planning the trip, which is the reason
  these tools aren’t needed. Surely, the right solution would solve that by
  replicating that enjoyment within the platform itself.
• Revenue. You could argue
  that if you solve all of the above, then this part will eventually fix itself.
  A good, sticky product should be able to convert enough customers to create
  viability, at least at the hotel stage or experiences stage. The pressure here
  is less than it was because the price to build the solution is a fraction of
  what it was a few years ago.

The problem is that you
could argue that any one of these factors acts as a super-veto on the success
of all trip-planning startups. You have to solve ALL of them to avoid failure.

It also might come down
to a matter of definition. What makes a trip-planning tool different to a
travel research website with a couple of tools bolted on? That’s a question
that will probably allow most people to claim they were on the correct side of
this debate.

If I was a betting
person, I would first say that Gemini, together with Google Travel and Maps, will become the first successful trip planning product. When it comes to
startups, I’m still on the fence.

In the very near future, you’ll probably see
the best trip-planning tool created to date. So if somebody builds the ultimate
tool, which actually works, has access to all the world’s travel information,
and has all of the bells and whistles that one could hope for, does that mean
people will actually use it, which will lead to success?

My best guess is … maybe.