Comment by venkasub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by venkasub | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, there are 3 kinds of traveller: 1. People who know where they are going for a stipulated period of time 2. People who know which region they are going to over a long period of time 3. People who have taken a sabbatical or couple of years off or have decided that they are going to be on road for a long period of time.

For #1 - hotel and flight deals matter the most For #2 - they figure out most of the stuff while on the move and do not want to plan much. they pretty much buy to-fro tickets from their base and figure out everything else on the move.

Monetizing the idea of 'where should i go' looks pretty tough to me. My pals tried a venture wherein based on the region of interest the website would come up with an itinerary, they couldnt do well and had to fold.

Travel industry needs technology and some disruption; it hasn't seen anything 'interesting' other than the known Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Agoda etc for a long period of time now.

Your characterization of travellers seems a bit off to me. Along those dimensions, there'd be at least two or three other categories of travellers. Not sure how to respond to that.

As for monetization: we don't plan to rush this. Once we have our recommendation engine built out and fleshed out, we will build business around it. But to optimize for revenue in the short term would probably be to diminish our chances in the long term. We want to prioritize consumer experience over everything else. And then only once we have that ramped up to a good scale, we could leverage the customer relationship to move down the funnel, closer and closer to the transaction itself.

Having said that, we're exploring multiple paths to monetization. For example, we think that Wanderlust will have an interesting advertising opportunity, with 1) high ARPU, 2) high purchase-intent, and 3) a user still open to suggestions (a bit like Pinterest's opportunity). One other stream we're thinking about is offering hotels an annual/monthly flat-fee to be featured on our platform.

Your reply was EXACTLY what my pals who started a similar firm gave me!

If you cannot monetize from Day-1, then it's going to be very difficult unless you repivot and change your biz-model; and also, ofcourse if you are not too keen on monetizing itself.

Hotels will not list unless there are network effects. Already there are tonnes of listing services. An average hotel in South East Asia lists in Agoda, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and many more!!

I would recommend this : take a few months off and travel across South East Asia(or atleast Thailand & Vietnam - as they are well connected to Internet) and hear the challenges faced by hotels and guesthouses. You will be surprised to hear what they say. Remember that whole of the Western World descends down in this region to escape winter.

(Call me short-sighted, but making money from Ads is not 'monetization' as per me)

I agree that the parent comment's three types of travelers isn't quite right -- I'm curious to hear what the archetypes that you have in mind are though.

[I'm a huge fan of spontaneous travel and have some side projects in travel destination/activity discovery myself. Happy to chat more via email.]

I think most travelers would probably fall in either one of these three categories:

Those that know where they'd like to go, how much they'd like to spend, and when they'd like to travel. (Traditional OTAs cater well to this category of people)

Those that know where they'd like to go and how much they'd like to spend, but don't know when they they'd like to travel. (e.g. When it would be cheapest to fly out; one solution that does a pretty good job of addressing this is Hitlist http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/07/hitlist-a-smarter-flight-fi...)

Those that don't know where to go, but do know how much they'd like to spend, and when they'd like to travel. (This would be the category we're addressing)

Along the 'where', '$', and 'when' dimensions, there would clearly be more combinations possible (i.e. 8), but the majority should fall in the three listed above. And sure, feel free to drop me a line at aron@wanderlust.ly -- always curious to hear about how others are thinking about this!

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