Content Curation World

"Historically, there have been only two ways of making money in travel - huge volumes of content (TripAdvisor, Google) or control of inventory (Expedia, Airbnb, Viator).

..., a ‘third way’ is emerging. “You’d see start-ups like Utrip, Citybot, Touristeye and us battling it out with stalwarts like Yahoo Travel and Lonely Planet to be the first to solve this pain,..."

...

...customer interviews revealed that creating an itinerary is a ‘meta’ level problem that most travellers struggle with.

By [curating by hand] and combining the data sources we were able to generate a new type of knowledge (ie: what’s the best trip to take when I’m travelling with kids to south of France?) that hadn’t been possible before.

This is a game-changer. It allows even start-ups to create proprietary knowledge that is not beholden to the industry giants."

Here's what Mygola’s co-founder Anshuman Bapna says: "The most intriguing battle to me is between curation and choice.

The trajectory for the past decade had been that more is better - more flight options, more hotels to choose from.

However, there’s a competing narrative building up now where editorial judgement reduces the choices to a much more manageable few - sort by ‘agony’ filter (Hipmunk), stay at these handchosen places (HotelTonight).

I find this very interesting as an entrepreneur because neither the existing industry leaders (Priceline) nor the pretenders to the throne (Google) excel at this kind of stuff.

This requires human judgement (not collaborative filtering, which is just a proxy for it) at scale."

Interesting. Right on the mark. 8/10

Full interview: http://www.eyefortravel.com/mobile-and-technology/less-more-online-travel-needs-curated-itineraries-based-human-judgement

Check the Mygola service here: mygola.com

(Image credit: Compass and shells - Shutterstock)