Trend: Travel Personalization

Travel personalization sites enable consumers to perfect the individual travel experience online.

Trend Description:
The web has become the best travel agent. Consumers cannot only research destinations, book flights and hotels, but really personalize their travel experience. While some big travel sites incorporate social networking features, forums, photo and video-sharing and personalized travel-blogs, some start ups offer new tips, tricks and ideas of how to make the trip as smooth as possible before it even started.

Cases:

Tripology:
Tripology is a free online service, connecting travelers with specialized travel agents. Users simply have to describe what they plan to do, where they want to go and what kind of a trip they are interested in. This could be either a cultural weekend in a metropolitan city or a safari-trip to Kenia. Tripology searches its database of currently 5000 travel experts, to match the user with three travel agents specialized in the field they are looking for. The travel experts than can help to organize the trip, arrange flights, cruises or flights, making hotel and tour recommendations. The website also features interviews with travel agents and articles about traveling. But Tripology is not an online travel agency.

Seatguru
Seatguru offers insight information about airplane seating, in-flight amenities and other airline policies (e.g. luggage, pets, infants). Travelers simply have to choose the airline they are flying with and will instantly receive contact and business information. A graphic seating chart allows to check the location and quality of their seat (how much foot space, how close to the toilets). Seatguru also informs about meals, entertainment options and spezial services.

TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is among the world’s largest online travel communities. Users cannot only search, find, compare and book their whole trip or vacation, they can also share their own experiences and pictures. Some personalization featuers are a personalized page, which contains full information about the user, stating the person’s recent travels or booking, contributions to TripAdvisor, reviews, user preferences for travel (pleasure or business), spending habits, and vacation choices. The personalization facility allows users to organize and plan one’s trip, save hotels, attractions, compare hotels, make a list of places one would like to visit, add maps and notes, organize items by destination or days, and create a personal travel guidebook to save, print or email. Personalized e-mail alerts and newsletters are also available.

Airport Parking
With Websites like AirportParkingReservations.com, parknflynetwork.com, and airportparking.com travelers do not have to worry about finding a parking spot at the airport anymore. Users can search for parking, select the closest parking lot and book a reservation. The printed receipt just must be presented at the parking lot. The travel itinerary includes the quoted rate, directions to the parking lot and other useful trip information.

Green Tags
Green Tags allows travelers to offset the carbon emissions from their trip by purchasing „Green Tags.“ The travel calculator allows users to simply calculate how many „Green Tags“ they would have to purchase to reverse the negative impacts of the greenhouse gas emission from their trip. With the purchase of the „Green Tags“ consumers support environmentally friendly projects, like solar and wind facilities. The purchase is tax deductible.

Trend Impact:
The success of online travel personalization is undeniable. TripAdvisor alone has over 20 million unique monthly visitors and approximately 5 million registered members. All in one websites like TripAdvisor seem to be the best business model. Especially if they stay on top of what is happening: Just recently TripAdvisor purchased SeatGuru.

SeatGuru

TripAdvisor

AirportParkingReservations

Parknflynetwork.com

Airportparking.com

Green Tags

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