Defining Travel 2.0

(image sourced from wikipedia)

The term "web 2.0" is commonly used to define the improved www. Tim O'Reiley once defined it as a "second generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in a new way—such as social netorking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies." Coverage of companies that define the next web are transending new media to traditional media - see Business Week's recent cover story on Digg and Newsweew's story on Flickr and MySpace. And now, the term is being applied more often to vertical categories, like travel.

Probably the most credible source to define Travel 2.0 has been Philip Wolf of PhoCusWright (PCW). See my earlier post Philip's Travel 2.0 thoughts. And more recently, John Bray of PCW was interviewed at the HITEC conference about how emerging technologies and companies will change the online travel landscape. Also, Christian Science Monitor posted an article recently titled: The next wave of travel website feels like Myspace. Simply put though, Travel 2.0 is Web 2.0 applied to online travel. A few important Travel 2.0 categories and their representative companies:

Group collaboration and planning
*TripHub (see most recent post)
Triporama
Yahoo! TripPlanner
Groople

Social travel
RealTravel
Gusto
43Places
Wikitravel

Travel search
*Farecast (see most recent post)
Kayak (see most recent post)
Paguna
Vast

Although all of this activity and innovation in online travel, which PCW estimates will represent close to $94 billion next year, is exciting and warrented, it begs the question: are there too many travel startup companies chasing too few genuine opportunities? Check out Katie Fehrenbacher's recent post that explores the travel startup bubble in more depth.

*Disclaimer: I work at Farecast and am an advisor to TripHub.