What is it about the idea of social media, trip planning, content-filled sites that seems to attract dozens of bright young things to the travel industry?
Tnooz has covered its fair share of trip planning sites on the TLabs Showcase over the past 18 months and here, at the latest Travel Innovation Summit from PhoCusWright, there is a string of similar sites again.
Now, it is worth pointing out out that almost all of the trip planning sites, especially those that have integrated the sharing elements at the heart of social media, are good.
Really good.
By good, this means the designs are more often than not first-rate, the overall user experience is infinitely better than many of the online travel agencies and supplier sites on the web, and - hey! - everyone loves social media.
Right?
Well, many, many people do indeed love social media (Facebook will probably hit one billion profiles some time over the next 18 months, for starters), so there is obviously potential to tap into the enthusiasm that at least a tenth of the world's population seemingly now have for sharing the minutae of their lives on the web.
And the apparent opportunity from integrating something as inspiration and aspirational as travel into social media, and subsequently forming content-heavy, trip planning sites, has not escaped the attenton of investors.
In the past two weeks alone, Gogobot has attracted $15 million and newbie Trippy landed $1.75 million.
But, as a succession of startups at the TIS event have found, when facing the quartet of cynics in the so-called critics circle (including Tnooz CEO Gene Quinn), there are huge questions over where these sites go after their initial launch phase.
There are a number of issues in play:
1. Scale
How do such businesses grow beyond their initial fanbases? Is it all about marketing? Can they - in the case of the Silicon Valley darlings - rely on the buzz of the tech community to spread the word to gain traction? Do they actually need massive traction to fulfil their objectives?
2. Investment
Where should these companies channel the often vast sums of money they are receiving? Marketing? Product development? What should be the priority to give backers a return on investment? Nobody seems to have answered this question yet.
3. Differentiation
Simple. How do these trip planners REALLY set themselves apart from one another. For all the user experience and cracking design, functionality is often too similar.
4. Facebook
The elephant in the room, obviously. While so many social media-led trip planners rely on Facebook for the social graph, integation through Facebook Connect, etc, will the omnipresent social network - as it evolves - become the place where people do their trip planning? Why bother with all those others?