We believe that the market for seeking out expertise is pretty big though. Do check out recent news about Vayable's pivot into a similar space.
Then I tried specialist tours, and loved everything except the control over the itinerary once there.
Then came the internet and it made the convenience work, and it allowed us to built our own complex itineraries. But now we faced hours of research to find what is worth visiting, and what isn't.
Recently I moved back to travel agents but now favour specialist ones.
Specifically, I use companies like this: http://www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk/ where every member of staff have lived or visited the destinations they serve.
I go in, sit down, and if I ask about Chile and the person in front of me hasn't been they go fetch a couple of people who have been.
I guess my question is: Have you just invented the specialist travel agent "on the internet" and "with the crowd"? For how is this different from anything that anyone could've done already?
That cynicism aside, I do think there's a big potential in being the gateway to such specialism as it can be hard to find the best agents for a given place.
It's not. We're just making them more accessible, easily discoverable, and leveraging the power of an open marketplace so the best ones can thrive. We're also giving them collaboration tools (think of it like a google docs for trip planning) to help them give structured and organized advice.
You might want to rephrase that, because that could be asked of anything and the answer would always be nothing.
Google was nothing different from anything anyone could've done. But they did it, and nobody else did.
Nobody else has done this (well) yet.
We are in beta and this is the sort of feedback that's really useful. We'll be fixing the flow so that we ask the user to sign in before they enter the question - that way its less likely to cause this problem. Sorry again about that.
Why not just pick up the planmytravel.com?
Long answer: http://blog.planmy.travel/post/61015163485/planmy-dot-what
just want to know how do I choose who is a good travel planner? for example if her profile states she is a food + wine expert, can I get a glimpse of how does she think about them? like links to their blog posts etc?
It's in private beta atm.
