here or there?

I was psyched to receive an email from Hugo Burge, of Cheapflights fame, recently regarding his new endeavor here or there? This social travel site enters a competitive arena, but the newly minted beta site scores well on user experience.

Here is what Hugo had to say about it:
"The site is for people who love travel and want to share travel experience. The initial launch offers a simple way to publish travel experiences (text, background, photos, embedded video, audio) and has tools to measure the popularity of these with the community. We have used YouTube like tools (rating, views, comments, tags) so that we can help surface the most interesting travel experiences to the front of the site."

"It is early days but I passionately believe in trying to solve the conundrum of travel inspiration, which i don't think is resolved or done well anywhere. In many ways it is the ultimate challenge and the web should do it well. Right now we ask friends, watch TV programs, browse the web etc but I want to evolve a personalised travel inspiration search."

Check it out and good luck Hugo.

Searchnomics

Brian Smith of SingleFeed and ComparisonEngines moderated a Travel Search panel, including me (representing Farecast), Drew Patterson of Kayak and Sam Shank of SideStep, at the Searchnomics Conference today. (Brian is a fantastic moderator by the way.) He asked the question: "Why have travel search engines grown so significantly as of late?" Curious what you think? There are likely multiple factors, perhaps including:

1) Users increased likelihood of shopping with aggregators and booking directly with supplier websites (travel search model supports this behavior)
2) Supplier support of the channel (in the form of referral compensation)
3) Strong online advertising budgets of travel companies (spending on TSEs)
4) Higher travel search monetization levels (fuels paid traffic growth at postive contribution)

Puddle Jumper TerraPass

Former Expedia CEO, and Farecast investor/board member, Erik Blachford recently joined TerraPass as CEO. If you haven't heard of them, TerraPass is an environmental start up that sells carbon offsets to counterbalance the carbon dioxide we all spew into the environment. Read more about them here.

There is a travel tie-in here. TerraPass has this nifty flight calculator that shows how much CO2 your flying puts in the air. For example, my flight to San Diego this weekend is 2,101 miles roundtrip and emits 945 lbs. of CO2 (per person). I'll be flying with a clear conscience though - just bought a Puddle Jumper TerraPass for $9.95 that reduces 2,500 lbs of CO2, covering me and my family.