Some interesting survey results

We are running a survey to find out how people book and plan destination attractions and tours. The survey is still in progress, but we are already seeing some strong trends.

Planning one day on a trip

First trend shows that planning one day on a trip is not such an easy task:

For anyone who travels at least once a year, this is not a surprising finding. Whenever we ask anyone about trip planning, people always tell us how inefficient and tie consuming that process is. If you traveled recently, you probably remember the feeling.

Content disconnected from the sale

The top two tools for researching destination activities are (not surprisingly) Google.com and Google Maps, followed closely by Yelp and TripAdvisor. When we look at how people surf the web while researching destination activities, the role of Google's properties becomes obvious - overwhelmingly, both Google.com and Google Maps are the starting point of research, and from there travelers go on to review sites, meta search sites and content sites.

While the finding itself is not surprising at all, the most interesting part is that none of the top five content sites provide means of booking destination activities. This is also consistent with PhocusWright research which shows that activity distribution is extremely fragmented, with almost half of all activities still being booked offline.

More results to follow

I am not going to make any more conclusions from these results at this point, so stay tuned for more results and analysis. And please take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MPBYCHQ

How we got @citybot and why Twitter handles are more important than domain names

When you are naming your new startup, do you usually count on someone calling you up and saying "Hey, I've got this seven letter domain name that matches the name of your business. You can have it… for free!". I bet you don't. Neither did we, nor did it happen to us, but something even better did happen!

I probably won't be the first one to say this, but I think that in the age of social web, twitter handles are as important as domain names. Actually - more important, way more important! It used to be crucial to have a domain name that matches your business name, or makes some sense, or at least is short and easy to remember. Then we ran out of domain names, and now you can pay north of $10,000 for a six-letter .com name. But you shouldn't. Domain names do not matter as much anymore. A short and unambiguous twitter handle is what matters the most!

If you don't agree with me, look at these three trends. First, Google is teaching us to use search words instead of website addresses. That's what they are doing by merging the address bar and the search bar in Chrome. You just type in what you want, and Google will figure out what the correct URL is. Next, everywhere on the web URLs appear shortened using services like bit.ly. And thus, many of your website visitors may not even know what your domain name is. And lastly, micro blogging/update streams such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming the main gateway to the content (that's why Google is so keen on having their own social network). These days, almost all blog posts that I read come from my twitter stream. Keep in mind that there are only 140 characters in a twitter message, so the shorter your handle, more content can accompany your handle in a single message.

So forget the domain names, and look for a short and memorable twitter handle when naming your business!

When we were naming CityBot though, twitter handles were not on our list of priorities. We were looking for available domains and ended up paying $700 for citybot.com. After buying the domain, I registered @citybotapp and was scratching my head thinking, how lame it was not to consider the twitter handle before buying the domain. Soon after, we sat down with our advisor @silverton to discuss our twitter strategy. We agreed it was a shame that @citybot was already taken, we did some research and figured that if we got lucky, whoever owned @citybot would be kind enough to give (or sell) it to us. We didn’t have high hopes - it was a long shot, but it was worth a try. We agreed that @silverton would facilitate this conversation.


And then the miracle happened! When @silverton reached out to @citybot, he realized that the owner, @anselm was connected to him via social graph. It turned out that @citybot was one of @anselm's numerous ideas that he had worked on recently. Several DMs later, @anselm sent us the password and wished us the best of luck.

This was a key social capital investment in our team. @anselm was willing to just give us the Twitter handle, based upon social capital exchanged previously with @silverton and others in their shared social graph. Could @citybot have been purchased for any amount, from completely unknown private parties? Maybe, we don't know. What we do know is how much the motivation and encouragement, attributed to a key early social capital investment of goodwill and faith in our team, has propelled us forward. So thank you @anselm! And thank you @silverton! We are making good use of @citybot with over 1000 followers already and adding more every day.

A word about crowd-sourced location data

One of the challenges in creating an algorithmic travel guide - or any location-based service, for that matter, is acquiring quality data. The Internet made all the content in the world available to everyone, yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to find quality content underneath a growing pile of duplicated and inaccurate results. Companies whose main business is search recognize the problem and are trying to solve it on the global scale. That's why we see many startups and big companies trying to apply social angle to search, power search by real people, and use semantics to make sense out of the confusion of content. Someone has to solve this problem and hopefully someone will.

Crowd-sourcing is a great idea. With the explosion of self publishing and web 2.0 crowd-sourcing became the primary way to amass huge databases of travel related content. In no time, sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, YP and Citysearch were able to collect hundreds of thousands of reviews from amateur writers and upset customers. However, there is a downside, and it's the same reason why you get laughed at for citing a Wikipedia article in research papers. Lacking a reliable validation system, crowd-sourcing tends to produce unreliable and often incorrect results. The primary solution so far (manual review by armies of editors) works to an extent, but ultimately is as flawed as the approach that fueled the rise of crowd-sourcing in the first place. Here's a great article about why reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp are often misleading: Why Online Review Sites Get One Star and a Wall Street Journal article about TripAdvisor. Granted, both of these are fairly old articles and the internet has changed a lot since 2007, and many consumer review sites have since started hiring armies of professional editors and writers to weed out and edit bad content. However, the problems are still there. Let's take a look.

Duplication of results

look at this screenshot from Yelp.com:

Obviously SFMOMA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are the same place, yet these two listings above have slightly different addresses and different phone numbers. The first listing is likely a red herring or a result of someone's inaccurate submission, as it has no ratings and no reviews. Yelp's editors are probably working tirelessly to weed out these kinds of entries, but the Yelp's growing popularity makes this an uphill battle. They may even have some automation tools that flag duplicate results, (I hope they don't do it all manually!) but reliably identifying duplicate results algorithmically is also a non-trivial problem.

Ambiguous categorization

This is my personal favorite. It seems that Yelp has a quite liberal approach when it comes to classifying locations, perhaps in the interest of erring on the side of extra information. This leads to some interesting observations: apparently, in San Francisco, every tatoo studio, coffee shop, hair salon and day spa that happens to have photos or paintings on the walls is considered an "Art Gallery":

Yes, I get it. The folks at Ginger Rubio are not just hair stylists, they are artists, they are obviously great at what they do, and they have 4.5 star rating and 106 reviews on Yelp to show for it. And yet we are to believe that it is an Art Gallery? Check out this screenshot of browsing "Art Galleries" category on Yelp:

Notice how the first two items in the list are actually tattoo studios. If you drill down and read the reviews you will find out that they are great tattoo studios that deliver outstanding results and top-notch customer service. All that's great - unless, of course, you are an art connouisseur visiting San Francisco looking to spend a day browsing the city's finest art offerings. It may be said that Yelp's content is tailored towards locals searching for consumer reviews rather then towards tourists looking for destination recommendations, but this only underscores the limitations inherent to such systems.

Conflicting or incorrect information

Let's pretend I am in New York and would like to visit some museums. Checking Lonely Planet's website, I see that the Tenement Museum comes up on the first page. (I should perhaps mention here that I love Lonely Planet guide books I have enough of them to fill a bookshelf). Here's what it says about museum hours:

Looks good, right? It tells me everything I need to know about the opening hours of this museum so I can plan my trip to be there on time. However, if I were to check Yelp for customer reviews, I might stumble onto the following:

This does not exactly contradict Lonely Planet's information, but it seems more precise. Just for the heck of it, let's check one more respected source, Frommer's (again, my collection of these guide books rivals that of Lonely Planet's):

Interesting. This may be the most useful information so far, since it warns that the schedule is complicated and implores you to check for yourself. If you take this advice and go to the museum's website, you are presented with a neat AJAXy calendar and tour schedule:

Problem Solved.

And yet, something is wrong with this picture. In an age when practically everyone and everything is connected with endless streams real-time information, is it too much to expect to quickly and easily be able to find the operating hours of a large museum in New York City? Is it unreasonable to expect to do this in two minutes, right on your smartphone, instead of cross-checking multiple sources, browsing websites, and calling around? We at Citybot definitely don’t think so. Someone has to solve this problem, and if we can play even a small part in the solution, we would be helping travelers everywhere enjoy their day.