Delivering Great Travel Planning Advice — A Story of Misaligned Incentives
There’s no shortage of startups who have tried to unseat TripAdvisor as the de-facto place to figure out what to do while planning a trip. The latest is TravelGap, but they are not alone. Every few weeks, I see a new startup enter the travel planning/advice market.
They all seem similar in the “problem” they address. Great travel advice is the lifeblood of great trips — and amazing, relevant, & personalized advice is incredibly hard to find.
“We’ll magically solve it for you.”
Having tried our hand at travel planning (we built a cliff notes version of TripAdvisor from trusted connections) and also having spent the last several years speaking to travelers on a daily basis, I have grown to believe travel planning is indeed one of the worst businesses to be in.
Why?
Misaligned incentives.
To deliver travelers great travel advice, you fundamentally need content. Lots of it, for thousands of cities in countries across the globe. There are really only three ways to source that content: write it yourself, scrape it, or aggregate it from individual contributors.
Most startups choose to source it from individuals, since writing original content is expensive and scraping it is against the terms of use of almost every publisher (not to mention it’s all duplicate content).
What many don’t realize is that not only is there no incentive for the average person to contribute travel advice, there is actually is an incentive NOT to share travel advice broadly.
The best travel advice will never be public.
If everyone knows about an activity or restaurant/bar, it’s not a secret anymore. Locals don’t want everyone to know about their favorite bar or restaurant. Why? Tourists overrun it. Restaurants become busy, loud, & crowded. Activities become expensive. Thus, locals have to find a new “secret” spot no one knows about. My own group of friends is constantly trying to find great bars with good drink specials no one else knows about. I’ve heard for years from travelers that “once something hits Lonely Planet, it gets ruined”. Travelers are constantly searching for the next hidden gem. Anything public, is by nature, not “hidden”.
Thus, neither travelers nor locals want to go where everyone else goes. The only people who want that to happen are the business owners (since they make more money when they are busy, and in many places can charge tourists more than locals).
Which brings us to sharing travel advice privately. If trading advice inside closed trusted networks, there’s really no need for an app or website — you can just reach out to them and ask via email, text, or Facebook. Sure, it’s inefficient, but people enjoy speaking to their friends about travel. It’s a reason to talk to someone you haven’t spoken to in a long time.
Every startup founder working on anything related to “travel advice” I’ve spoken to has struggled to source enough content — to me, that comes down to a challenge of incentives. As we learned with Horizon, products with incentives on only one side are slow growth businesses.
Advice for entrepreneurs working on travel planning: align incentives so content creators have a reason to contribute, while not ruining the appeal of the establishments and activities you’re promoting.
There’s no easy answers, but no one said startups are easy.
