Less than a day after ESPN launched it’s fairly clunky Sports Travel Site in partnership with Orbitz, Mobissimo launches Activity Search, it’s first step on a journey to become the virtual travel concierge. Read the press release.
As opposed to that plain old travel search box we’re all familiar with, there’s no destination box on Mobissimo Activity Search, just (you guessed it) activities. A user specifies what he wants to do as opposed to where he wants to go. At this point, users can choose from a drop down list of 20 activities including Film Festivals, Opera Houses, Skiing, and Wine Tasting, but this list will expand over time. If sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us are any indication. The list of activities will expand a lot.
As Beatrice Tarka, CEO of Mobissimo explained, “This is a 1st step to allow users to be involved with the product. We’ll provide content around activities as well. This is a major departure from the usual boxes that have been around for 10 years which forced you to search a certain way. With [Mobissimo Activity Search], we’ll use Delicious type ratings and rankings - for example, we’ll look at the number of people who have rated a place using golfing tags, and we will add hyperlinks to additional content.”
For the Web 2.0 uninitiated, Del.icio.us as well as Flickr and Technorati employ the use of user generated tags to categorize content. There was a great article in Business 2.0 last year about the Flickrization of Yahoo! It’s a good place to start if you want to understand the power of Flickr and Web 2.0 ideas like user generated content. As the article stated, “To use Flickr is to belong to the culture of participation sweeping the Web–where you write your own blog, produce your own podcast, and post your personal photos for all to see.”
Mobissimo Activity Search works through tagging. For instance, Telluride, CO is tagged ’ski’, Nice, France is tagged ‘film festival’ (Cannes), and Pasto, Colombia is tagged ‘volcano’ (Galeras). But the beauty of tagging and Mobissimo Activity Search is that you don’t have to know if Telluride is good for skiing, where the Cannes Film Festival is held, or if Colombia has volcanos. All you have to know is that you want to participate in one of these activities.
Here’s an example, I enter the airport where I’m flying from (SFO) and choose ‘Ski’ along with the dates for my trip. Mobissimo produces over 30 results for ski destinations (both domestic and international). I can choose up to 3 destinations (Telluride, Vancouver, and Zurich) and Mobissimo returns airfare results for all three. As stated above, Mobissimo will soon provide additional content for each of these destinations so I can make a more educated choice in my travel.
The Activity Search also allows a user to specify additional tags or keywords. Let’s say I choose ‘Spring Training’ as my activity, but I’m only interested in the Boston Red Sox (just an example). I can enter ‘Boston’ as a keyword and Mobissimo’s activity search will return only Fort Myers where the Red Sox and Tigers play as opposed to all the Spring Training locations in Florida and Arizona. As opposed to just choosing the activity ‘Theme Park’, you can specify a keyword like ‘Roller Coaster’. For ‘Wine Tasting’, specify ‘Merlot’. Right now, the choices are somewhat limited (which is frustrating), but hopefully you can see the potential…which leads to the Web 2.0, user generated content part….
In the very near future, Mobissimo will allow its users to add their own tags just as you’d tag a link in Del.icio.us or picture in Flickr. So I could tag Samurai Beach, Australia with ‘nude’. I could tag Perugia, Italy with ‘chocolate’. I could tag Telluride with ‘moguls’ and ‘expert’. The possibilities are endless as everyone will have different tags that are important to them when classifying a destination. And that’s the real power behind Activity Search.
As for the travel supplier’s perspective, there are a lot of benefits to Activity Search, including the potential to sell high margin vacations packages and bid on certain keywords (as opposed to just city pairs). From the press release “For marketers, Activity Search, or contextual search, means they can craft their advertising messages based not only on the origin and destination cities, but also on activities thus making their offers even more compelling.”
But what does all of this mean for Mobissimo which has been completely overshadowed by Kayak and SideStep? According to Beatrice “we’ll have advertising [for Activity Search]. Mobissimo is entering an expansion phase. We want to create a sticky community of users. We are still an intermediary, but you have to have a value proposal that is different. On the outside, Mobissimo, Kayak, and SideStep look the same. While the other companies have been buying keywords [on the PPC engines], we’ve been devoted to product development. Activity Search is just the first step. This year is all about user focus.”
I said last week that focusing on the user experience isn’t enough to build loyalty, but building out a social search experience gets me excited and makes me want to eat those words (a bit). Mobissimo’s Activity Search has a long way to go, but the beginning looks promising especially because it’s radically different than the status-quo.
Who needs a travel agent when Mobissimo (and its community) has already figured out the top beaches, surfing locations, zoos, and hiking trails?
Update: At least that’s the idea of the virtual concierge. Check out Mark Johnson’s take.
Tags: mobissimo, web 2.0, tagging, tags
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Mobissimo Activity Search Advertising - March 20, 2006
Vertical Search - Travel Search, Job Search, Shopping Search - March 10, 2006
Mobissimo - More Comprehensive Than Expedia & Travelocity? - June 7, 2005
Rob Solomon Books a Trip on SideStep - January 16, 2006
March 21st, 2006 at 9:16 am
Well, Brian, the del.icio.us concept might go somewhere, but you’ve sorta missed the boat on saying this is The New Next Big Thing. Other sites have had variations on this forEVER. Cripes, I had it built and launched on Expedia.ca at least 4 years ago. It’s been killed off since because they added other packages from tour operators and, one presumes, it didn’t do much for users (personally, I always thought that the feature as it got built was half-hearted - death by a thousand cuts and dev constraints, but anyway). Expedia.co.uk still has the “Inspirator” - there’s a link to it right from their home page A column. It’s not as robust, but it’s been around for a looooong time.
Methinks your breathless enthusiasm, while well intentioned, is a wee bit misdirected. Yes, travellers like to plan on the basis of things other than date/flight/room/price, and yes the OTAs haven’t done super well at it (though let’s not forget that TripAdvisor *is* Expedia) but this is not exactly news.
- Stuart