Forbes Travel Guide Debuts Startle, An Online Planning Site For Luxury Travel. Forbes Travel Guide is debuting Startle.com, a new online travel planning site for luxury travel. Launching in 72 U.S. markets and 5 international markets (Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic), Startle uniquely combines content from Forbes Travel Guide inspectors, tastemakers and hotel, restaurant and spa experts. The sites includes reviews of Forbes Travel Guide hotels, restaurants and spas, which are based on a 500-criteria service evaluation conducted by professional inspectors who visit each location anonymously. User can access insider deals on hotels, activities, and even transportation. Startle offers a Q&A platform where consumers can follow questions and get access to curated answers to key travel planning questions by experts and renowned tastemakers, sommeliers, concierges, and General Managers from luxury hotels.
Startle faces competition from the plethora of travel planning sites available to consumers including Oyster and Jetsetter. Startle – Expert Hotel, Restaurant, Spa and Destination Reviews. Travel Guides and Hotel Reviews | MyTravelGuide.com. Travel Guides, Hotel Reviews, Photos, Forums, Deals - VirtualTourist.com. ASIA Travel Tips.com. Travel guide - your worldwide travel guide. Frommer's Travel Guides: The Best Trips Start Here!
Ex-Googlers Launch Mobile Travel Guide To Kill Lonely Planet; Raise Funding From Chris Sacca & More. In the days of yore, travel guides were written by intrepid travelers who spent months scribbling in diaries and field journals, or by teams of adventurous souls exhaustively scrap booking their travel experiences into the Lonely Planets of the world. Over the last decade, however, the Web has produced an untold number of personal travel blogs, digital photo albums, community-built travel guides like Tripadvisor and Wikitravel, and cool travel resources like Gogobot. Today, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, are officially unveiling their new mobile travel guide Triposo, which doesn’t want to just throw out the old model, it wants to do what Google did for the world’s information: Aggregate that sucka and make it easily searchable. Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms.
And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.