The Egyptian Revolution has taken a toll on the country's tourism,
with visitor numbers down 35 percent between April and June 2011,
compared with last year. Photo / AP The pyramid rose out of the sand
before me, its smooth stone walls crumbling around ...
Posted at TechCrunch: 04 Mar 2011 08:30 AM PST
Startup Geotrio is launching today as a centralized platform for anyone to create, take and share tours. Tours range from historical and architectural tours for travelers, campus tours for prospective students, neighborhood tours, local shopping tours, and more.
The startup is also unveiling an iPhone app that will detect tours in your geographic area and allow users to download audio tours created by professionals as well as by amateur guides. And users will be able to upload tours on the fly. Geotrio will also mark a professional-created tour with a recommendation (as opposed to user generated tours).
So far, the bootstrapped Geotrio has signed partnerships with a number of partnerships with universities and businesses to create tours. For example, the startup has partnered with bike rental company in America, Bike and Roll to create a tour of the sights in San Francisco and will soon create several more for New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Miami. Geotrio also partnered with the DLD Conference to create two city tours of Munich.
The company wants to be the "YouTube for Tours," but it will need to scale significantly to get to that point. It would make sense for Geotrio to partner with a travel information and content site to tap into a large set of users.
You can find Geotrio's iPhone apps here and here.
From March 1, travel company adverts on social networking sites such
as Facebook and Twitter are to come under the scrutiny of the
Advertising Standards Authority for the first time.
At the moment, the ASA has jurisdiction only over paid-for adverts and
sales promotions online, but its powers are being extended.
The expansion of the remit has been partly funded by a £200,000
donation from search engine giant Google.
Travelzoo warned today that the new code will be difficult to police
without the assistance of the public.
It said its own researchers have found that over 80% of the travel
offers they currently review are misleading to consumers or do not
represent good value.
Under the new code, the ASA will be able to remove paid-for search ads
that link back to web pages hosting non-compliant marketing
communication, and "name and shame" companies that continue to not
comply with advertising regulations.
Travelzoo's European operations director Stephen Dunk said: "Travelzoo
very much welcomes the extended regulations, but we are concerned that
they will be difficult to police, given the sheer scale of the
internet and how prolific social media now is.
"To come up with our weekly Top 20 deals, the team searches through
hundreds of travel offers, advertised in all forms of media including
print, broadcast, online and social media.
"Each week, we have to reject over 80% of the deals that we find for a
number of reasons, including misleading deal information or prices
that are out of date or not available.
"Just last week we found hotel deals advertised in the weekend papers
at under £40 per night. When the team tried to test-book the deals,
some rates were only available for one or two nights."
He said the main issues Travelzoo's deal experts come across each week are:
- Deals have already sold out or are no longer available at the price
originally advertised
- Deals where there are significant hidden costs involved that change
the final price of the deal
- Deals that cannot be booked online and sales teams are not aware of
the deal when customers call to book.
By Bev Fearis
