Ever since Microsoft incubated Expedia 15 years ago, Seattle's been a hotbed when it comes to online travel. There's Farecast, Yapta and Escapia to name just a few. Now, a new startup company called Raveable is emerging with a product that promises to help people make sense out of hotel reviews and recommendations.
Founded by former Microsofites Philip Vaughn and Rafik Robeal, Raveable was formed after Vaughn got frustrated spending hours trying to sift through hotel reviews.
"It was personally frustrating that I could research a car or a flat-panel television in half the time I could find a hotel in a major city," said Vaughn, the former group manager for Microsoft SQL. "...In the age of the Internet, access to information should lead to efficiency and improved decision making. The opposite is happening in travel."
In fact, Vaughn cites a Forrester study indicating that 51 percent of travelers are unhappy with the process of researching travel information online.
So what is Raveable building and how is it different from other online travel sites?
Vaughn describes the service as the "Cliffs-Notes for hotel reviews," meaning that it provides abbreviated versions of reviews found on sites such as TripAdvisor and MyTravelGuide. It does this based on "semantic analysis," a natural language process that allows the company to read and analyze opinions found in millions of hotel reviews.
Vaughn doesn't view the big online travel search sites such as Kayak or Hotels.com as competition, saying Raveable is more similar to product review sites such as Buzzillions, Pluribo and Retrevo. None of those sites have a focus on travel or hotels, which could create an opening for Vaughn's new startup.
The 2-person upstart, which quietly unveiled a public beta this week, has been bootstrapped to date. But Vaughn plans to go out for a round of capital this summer.
The site plans to make money through referral fees, earning a commission when a user books a room through one of its partners.
Obviously, the slumping economy is having an impact on travel budgets. But maybe -- just maybe -- people will spend more time doing research before spending their hard-earned dollars.
After all, there's nothing worse than arriving at a nasty hotel after a long day of travel.
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