It dawned on me recently that like so many other Google apps, Wave has the potential to disrupt the crowded trip planning site arena.
If you haven't received your coveted Google Wave invite, don't worry, you probably will soon.
The problem is that once you receive it, it really doesn't do much for you until you find some contacts to Wave with.
While working with Graham Robertson, a Canadian blogger who lives in Australia on an interview that we were conducting via the Wave, it occurred to me that the tool would be particularly useful if I were planning a trip with a group of people.
Here is how I imagine it would work:
I would invite a few of my travel mates to join a wave.
We would start the conversation around the destination or activities we would want to do, share some files, links to sites we find, maybe even some photos that we upload.
Sort out the details in real-time and store the entire conversation on-line. We can all go back through the conversation at any point in order to pick up stuff we've missed or add comments and replies as we go.
Once the decision is made, we could even upload copies of reservations or bookings directly to wave to store and share with everyone in the wave.
So, two important questions:
- Why this could be a planning site killer? Simply put, it's impartial, it's multi-purpose, it's available, and it's Google. Although the Wave is not specific to travel and it's not readily apparent that you can use the Wave to organize group travel, it only takes a few smart people to figure out that the Wave is a useful tool for this purpose before it spreads through the social web. The advantage that Wave has over other planning tools is that it is completely social and everyone knows that planning group travel is a social endeavour.
- Fight the Wave or go with the flow? So, now that the cat is out of the bag, do you build that group travel planning site or do you just give up and concede defeat to Google? There is always room for innovation and for specialization. Although the functionality is all there to support group travel planning, chances are most agents and consumers are going to use a tool that is specifically travel related. So the opportunity now exists to use the Wave as inspiration to build a better group planning tool.
Josh Steinitz, CEO of
NileGuide, for example doesn't see Google Wave as a threat.
He believes that travel planning tools are only one part of the equation and that the content is the most important element.
"At NileGuide, we see the starting point for our mission as delivering great recommendations about what to do on your trip. So the trip planning tools are simply ways to make those recommendations actionable for the real-world needs of organizing a real trip itinerary.
"However, at the end of the day, the tools aren’t what will stand up to competition, but rather the content combined with the functionality. Google Wave has real potential to change the preferred means of person-to-person communication from standard email to real-time conversation and collaboration, but real trip planning still requires a database of actual content to be useful in the real world."
James Dunford Wood of World Reviewer is even more skeptical of Google Wave's impact noting that the open nature of widget development, that Google promotes, makes it hard for really good widgets to succeed.
"What's needed is one definitive open trip planning widget where suppliers can feed in their inventory into one interface via open standards (XML APIs)."
Being an ardent supporter of open standards (like the OpenTravel Alliance), I would have to agree that whoever can come up with a way to integrate Wave into a widget that includes open connectivity will stand a very good chance of dominating the space.
I'll be curious to see what develops in this space in 2010.
At NileGuide, we see the starting point for our mission as delivering great recommendations about what to do on your trip. So the trip planning tools are simply ways to make those recommendations actionable for the real-world needs of organizing a real trip itinerary. However, at the end of the day, the tools aren’t what will stand up to competition, but rather the content combined with the functionality. Google Wave has real potential to change the preferred means of person-to-person communication from standard email to real-time conversation and collaboration, but real trip planning still requires a database of actual content to be useful in the real world.