TravelMuse

Infobox Dotcom company
company_name = TravelMuse
company_
company_type = Travel planning service
foundation = Kevin Fliess and Eric Wood
location_city = Los Altos, California
url = http://www.travelmuse.com


launch_date = June 2008

TravelMuse is a travel planning web site that intends to help traveling by finding inspiration, planning and booking a vacation. TravelMuse combines original editorial content, destination guides as well as research and planning tools.

Articles written by seasoned writers are published on a weekly schedule with a new issue cover featuring a new destination. For its beta release in June 2008, the company introduced the Inspiration Finder^TM, a tool to help people discover destinations suiting their interests and budget.

TravelMuse is free to use and generates revenue from advertising and travel bookings. Reservations and bookings made on TravelMuse.com are powered by World Choice Travel, a division of Travelocity.com LP, a Sabre Holdings company.

History

TravelMuse (formerly known as TripOvation [ [http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/31/travel-booking-company-tripovation-raises-3m/ VentureBeat: Travel booking company, TripOvation, raises $3M] ] ) was founded in April 2007 by co-founders Kevin Fliess (CEO) and Eric Wood (VP of Products). The company has raised more than $3.5 million in funding from Azure Capital Partners and California Technology Ventures. TravelMuse is headquartered in Los Altos, California. [cite web|url=http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=5656887|title=abc30.com: New Kind Of Startup Returns To Silicon Valley 9/14/07|publisher=abclocal.go.com|accessdate=2008-08-15|last=|first=]

Products

* TravelMuse Articles and Features: provide the foundation for content on TravelMuse.com. Articles and features are written by a team of professional writers and local experts, with a focus on family travel.
* TravelMuse Guides: list more than 100,000 points of interest, including city guides, dining, hotels, attractions and shopping.
* TravelMuse Inspiration Finder^TM: helps travelers discover destinations by entering parameters such as budget, number of travelers, preferred vacation activities and desired travel time.
* TravelMuse Planner: offers a place to gather travel research from TravelMuse and across the Web, and share information with companions, family and friends.
* TravelMuse Blogs: share travel experiences, news and advice to travelers while embracing social media. TravelMuse has three blogs: TravelMusings blog, Company blog and Photo blog.

Travel Industry Needs

The online travel industry continues to grow exponentially, exceeding the growth rate of the overall travel market (both offline and online combined). In 2007, online leisure/unmanaged business travel comprised more than one-third of the total travel market, according to travel industry research group, PhoCusWright [ [http://www.phocuswright.com/research_publications_buy_a_report/402 PhoCusWright U.S. Online Travel Overview, Seventh Edition, November 2007] ] . Although the online travel industry continues to innovate, consumer research has shown that numbers of frequent and infrequent travelers are still frustrated with researching and buying travel online [Forrester’s NACTAS 2006 Q1 Ultimate Consumer Panel Travel Online Survey] —especially with the lack of personalization to meet specific, individual travel needs [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/technology/29ecom.html Henry Harteveldt Forrester Research quoted in the NY Times, October 2007] ] . As the industry evolves from its current state of Travel 2.0 to Travel 3.0, industry analysts anticipate a focus on providing a more personalized experience in addition to more intuitive planning and booking tools to meet the demands of growing numbers of online travel users. [ [http://www.phocuswright.com/research_publications_buy_a_report/483 PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey, Tenth Edition, June 2008] ]

References

External links

* [http://www.travelmuse.com TravelMuse web site]