TripSay blog

Travel is an interesting and fun business to be in. But there’s this additional benefit that makes building a travel service even funnier: it’s almost mandatory for us to test our service and do some leisure traveling on the side. How else to get first-hand feedback regarding the features and data?!

At the time being, we have guys testing the Alpine hiking trails for sport-oriented profiles. It’ll be interesting to hear whether our filtering engine was able to pick the right places for them and what kind of fine-tuning do we need to do…

Next week we’ll send people to Rome to test out the city vacation planner. After that it’s time to see how our feature set fits with road tripping (test site will be around Trieste / Northern Italy)… And in August maybe some party-profile “business” tripping in Spain…

- The Vailoma team

We are developing a service for an active traveler interested in exploring the globe. Currently we have about 200 000 destinations in our database and tons of content on them. Our purpose is to provide the traveler with tools for discovering the most interesting stuff from this huge mass of information. We consider the interesting information to be things such as: where to go, why people (like yourself) go there, and what to do over there. Once the best destinations are found our tool will help the traveler to build the trip and buy it. However, we have not placed special focus on providing suitable restaurants, hotels etc. as we have considered them to be too detailed for trip planning.

In our opinion it’s waste of time to overplan one’s trip by putting together a minute-by-minute schedule saying that “on Thursday I’m going to eat some Sauerkraut in Restaurant Lederhosen”. To us trip planning begins with the destinations and finding out the places to see and visit. If there’s an exceptional restaurant around the area you’re going to visit then our service will present the restaurant to you. Otherwise restaurants are just a commodity and not a part of a high level trip plan. This is not the typical travel guide approach in which most of the guide book is reserved for listing restaurants (budget, medium and high-end) and hotels. Think about it: have you ever chosen to go to Venice instead of Florence because - according to some travel guide - there’s this “good value for money” pizzeria right around the corner from Piazza San Marco?

Similar logic more-or-less applies for accommodation. Often it’s enough to plan a trip on a level that “on Thursday we’ll be staying in this town” instead of nailing down the specific hotel. Similarly hotels are a commodity. You can always find a place to stay.

What is the correct level of detail in planning a trip? What is the must have information when planning a vacation? Are you interested in restaurants? Are you very interested in hotels? What about deciding where to go in the first place? In our opinion restaurants and hotels are not the point. The point of travelling is to get experiences and discover thrilling places. Like in “Okay, I’m in Sydney, I must see the Opera House. But I definitely must take the 2-hour train ride to Blue Mountains because travelers like myself say that it’s the place to see around here.”

-The Vailoma team

After quite a long and intense development period we are now launching the very first version of Vailoma (we’ll still be “invite only” for some time, though).

Vailoma is a service for the active traveler who wants to discover interesting destinations visited by others like them, find all the information needed to plan and purchase a fun vacation and share the experiences with others. Everything in the service is collaboratively filtered: destinations, ratings, reviews, … you name it. The more you use the service the better it will provide you with the information you’re interested in.

When planning our own vacations we got more than a bit frustrated with the existing travel services. You need to surf around to collect information on destinations, flights, hotels and what else to get everything you need. It’s time consuming and not that much fun. We wanted to create a service that would eliminate the need to surf around the internet in search of destination content, traveler reviews, flights etc. and would arrange the information so that we’d see the information fitting our profile first. No more fuss about using hours and hours on planning the trip.

We are constantly developing the service and adding cool new features as we continue to build the site and we would appreciate your comments. So please comment on this blog or send email to info@vailoma.com. In case you don’t have an invite, you can ask for one by sending an email to info@vailoma.com.

Happy traveling! -The Vailoma team

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