Travel recommendation platform Gogobot rebranded last week as Trip.com and added several new tools that it believes will enable it to outwit larger efforts at in-destination and "in-country" tourism by Google, with its new Trips app, and Airbnb, with its new "experiences" effort.
A geeky question, first: How did CEO and co-founder Travis Katz get a hold of the Trip.com URL?
A look at the domain ownership database shows that it was most recently registered by Orbitz, part of Expedia Inc.
Katz says, "I cannot comment on where we bought it or how that worked, though I can confirm I have been working on acquiring this for a while..."
To understand the company's changes, a bit of back story helps:
Founded in 2010, Gogobot has been the most successful of the dedicated travel platforms relying on social for their juice. By 2012, it was claiming more than a million users. In 2014, monetization was working well enough that further funding wasn't seen as necessary.
As of now, it says it has been experiencing triple-digit, year-on-year revenue growth for more than a year, which it credits to its hotel metasearch product gaining traction.
But despite media accolades, the San Francisco-based startup has not grown at the hectic pace expected by Silicon Valley investors, who have poured $39 million into the company.
One theory is that it has been unable to satisfy users who only wanted to plan travel with their friends (and thus preferred Facebook). While Gogobot allowed users to invite Facebook friends over, this didn't happen much.
The platform seems to have had a substantial base of users who have been willing to regularly perform various actions, such as write short reviews of hotel stays, and swap travel tips with strangers. But the startup hasn't had hockey stick growth.
The company views things a bit differently and thinks that the issue has been about mastering mobile-first as a different type of consumer behavior and mindset. Katz has shared that thinking with Tnooz readers in a recent, widely shared opinion piece "For big travel firms, the mobile struggle is real."
In brief, Katz's argument is that a travel app has to have all-in-one usefulness, it has to have stickiness beyond a once-a-year-vacation use case, and it has to be personally relevant.
Last week, Gogobot rebranded as Trip.com and added predictive technology tools and a raft of notifications to try to be more of a "local experiences" mobile app rather than just a once-a-year-vacation mobile app.
Toward that end, the company says it has begun "offering proactive notifications right to a user's home screen that factor in the user's preferences as well as what's happening in the world around them (e.g. location, if they're at home or traveling, time of day, weather and more)."
The company is also rolling out a context-aware map feature to help users find hotels that are close by to the restaurants and sights that they care about through a simple-to-use overlay. If you are visiting New York City and know you want to explore a particular landmark like the High Line, you can now use the map to find relevant hotels.
Shortly after Trip.com made its debut at the Phocuswright Conference, Airbnb announced its ambition to deliver experiences, such as activities, via its platform.
How does Trip.com respond to that? Katz told us:
"We have always believed that in mobile, the traveler doesn't want to have their experience fragmented across multiple apps and websites. They want to have one trusted app that is with them every step of the way, from research to booking to navigating their trip.
"In many ways, we see the latest offerings from Airbnb and Google as validating what we have known all along.
Yet while you will recognize a lot of our design in their UI, the products are quite different.
Where the others offer the same, generic recommendations to every traveler, Trip.com leverages our patented tribes and predictive algorithms to save you time, bringing you smart recommendations, tailored to your interests, exactly when you need them. No one else in the industry is close."
And what about Google with its Trips app?
At the Phocuswright Conference last week, a panel of judges evaluated Katz's pitch and specifically discussed the possible Google Trips threat. The consensus of the bulk of the panel was that Google had not shown itself to be dedicated enough to travel to solve the pain point as effectively as Trip.com is doing.
A key investor in Trip.com is Robert Lee of Battery Ventures. He's told Tnooz he is optimistic:
"In the case of Gogobot the ratings and reviews space is enormous. TripAdvisor is worth $14 billion. The chance to re-invent the travel experience via the lenses of mobile and social could lead to a multi-billion dollar company."
Earlier, by Katz: For big travel firms, the mobile struggle is real