Online travel agency Via.com’s co-founders, Vinay Gupta and Amit Aggarwal have launched Tripfactory Pte Ltd, which runs travel related site Tripfactory.com. The website still seems to be in alpha stage and is only accepting email addresses to keep users informed about its launch. This was first reported by Techcircle.
According to the website, the company will provide a search engine for travel related content on the web. For the same, the company has tied up with online and offline suppliers. Besides that, it will also provide shopping experiences around a trip. It also indicates that the website will allow one to connect their profiles across various social media websites to create personalized recommendations.
We feel traveling is a very personal experience and providing recommendation could be tricky. What works for one could not necessarily work for other, which is why we believe OTA’s have not ventured into travel recommendations in the past. However, with the amount of user information being shared on various social networking sites, it has become possible to acquire and analyze user data and provide recommendations on the same. It needs to be seen whether travel firms are able to analyze data and provide relevant recommendations, as most of the time users do share irrelevant data on social networking sites. In such cases, the recommendation provided by the travel firms could only result in spam and nothing else.
Interestingly, in September 2012, the government of India had launched Sandhan, a search engine for tourism related queries in five Indian Languages including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil. However, when we checked the search engine only provided search results to blogs and Wikipedia entries and did not display any relevant information on the search query.
Mygola.com also provides customized trips crowd sourced by its users. One can create their own trip or follow someone who has posted a trip itinerary.
Online travel agents such as goibibo.com, ClearTrip.com, Expedia, among others also include travel packages. There’s also Singapore based travel meta search engine Wego which had launched an India-specific portal, Wego India. It also offers an indic language interface 11 Indian languages including Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, and offers flight and hotel search.
