InsideTrip - A new spin on the Mega-Travel Search model

A new meta-search company, InsideTrip was mentioned today in Tech Crunch.










The model is the now familiar multi-site airline search pioneered by SideStep, Kayak, Farecast and Mobissmo (not to forget the original pioneer, FareChase which only recently was put on the front page of Yahoo! Travel ). The twist is a rating system that evaluates the quality of a given selection based on three specific categories - speed, comfort and ease and 12 so-called "pain points" such as number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type, connection time, and gate location. Users can indicate which of these pain points are most important and the service will generate a unique TripQuality score for each ticket result. Interesting concept that mirrors the corporate purchasing philosophy of "Total Cost of Ownership" which measures products and services often assigning a numeric score to a qualitative evaluation. A bigger trend is represented here as well which includes personalization techniques adopted by Kayak and Mobissimo as well as semantic search evaluations by start-ups Kango, Nile Guide and Circos. The commonality is a system that filters search results based on user designated criteria. This level of personalization applied to travel search is long overdue and can produce results that are more in sync with the user's needs. That being said, the Achilles heel for these type of personalization techniques is simply a concern that the filtering may eliminate choices that would be acceptable to the user. With gradual maturing of the market for meta-search, competitive efforts promise to continue to provide different tools to filter content to better meet a user's profile. Who owns this preference profile and whether it can be used across sites, is an emerging battle for customer ownership that is underlining the goal to position the company as the first stop in travel search.