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New digital tools are helping consumers with travel planning challenges, such as comparing prices, discovering experiences, and making trips more attainable.
When planning a trip, consumers often have to handle various tasks that aren’t interconnected but are necessary. Finding a hotel, comparing prices, researching activities, checking requirements, and deciding how to pay for the trip are all important to an enjoyable trip, but are siloed and not connected.
Most travel technology has been mostly focused on booking. New digital platforms are addressing issues consumers encounter when preparing to book travel, such as funding their trips, planning outdoor experiences, and comparing hotel prices. Modern platforms are focusing on transparency, making it easier to find affordable trips.
Making Travel More Affordable
A major challenge for many travelers is finding a trip they can afford, especially for honeymoons. Many newlyweds incur substantial travel expenses for their honeymoons. Honeyfund is a platform that addresses the funding side of travel.
Founded in 2006, the company was co-founded by Sara and Josh Margulis, who came up with a concept to help fund their honeymoon in Fiji. They designed a platform that allows couples to create itemized travel experiences that their wedding guests can choose to fund. According to Honeyfund, research shows itemized registries receive 65^ more gifts than open-ended cash funds.
“When the wedding guests can see all the fun things you’re doing on your trip, it gets them more excited to give. If they know that they can buy your dinner on the beach, or your parasailing adventure, and it’s something that means something to them, maybe they did that on their own honeymoon, they’re going to not only potentially spend a little more, but also have a really good feeling about the fact that they gave you something personal,” says Sara Margulis, co-founder of Honeyfund.
Recently, Honeyfund partnered with Rocket Travel, and couples will soon be able to book hotels using their Honeyfund wallets.
“So all your gifts come in, you’ve got the money in your wallet, and you can now go spend that on a hotel booking directly. No credit cards are involved. The money passes directly into that booking. You can also earn rewards when you make that booking,” Sara explains.
The platform also draws on the data Honeyfund has collected over its 20 years of service.
“We have AI tools that can help suggest to them the kinds of things they can do in the destination they’re dreaming of. When you’re signing up, we capture your destination, your travel dates, and what kinds of things you want to do on your trip — your vibe. With that information, plus our 20 years of data, we surface the best recommendations we have. What we’re seeing is that couples who are engaged with it are more likely to come back to their account, and that tells us it’s working,” Sara shares.
Bringing Structure to Adventure Travel
When planning outdoor travel, consumers face various challenges. Outdoor activities are commonly spread across individual outfitter websites, making it time-consuming to compare adventures and pricing, check skill requirements, find age and weight restrictions, permits or insurance, and consolidate all that information to make a schedule.
TripOutside is a platform with information on over 5,000 adventures across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Founder, Julie Sing, built the platform after she had trouble when planning her own multi-adventure trips. It is a comparison-oriented platform compiled by a team that gathers information directly, so it may feature details that don’t appear online.
“One of the most interesting things we discovered in Puerto Rico is that bio bay kayaking, one of the coolest experiences you can do there, has strict weight limits on tandem kayaks, sometimes as low as 250 pounds. But none of the outfitters had it posted on their websites. So we created a whole chart of all the different outfitters, their kayaks, and what the weight limits are. That is the kind of information travelers need before they book, and that’s what we’re here to provide,” says Julie Singh, founder of TripOutside.
The site helps take the guesswork out of planning an outdoor adventure and allows travelers to book with confidence.
“Our content writers call every outfitter and just understand a little bit more about their businesses, because you can’t always find everything online. There are a lot of questions people have: Is this good for a beginner? Is this good for kids? What are the age limits? What are the requirements? We do a really good job of listing all that out for all of the adventures on our site so that people can make those decisions online without having to call the outfitters themselves,” Julie explains.
Travelers can compare options and directly book with the outfitters. Every booking donates a portion of the cost to help fund conservation projects through The Conservation Alliance.
“We’re a member of the Conservation Alliance, which is a group of outdoor businesses, like Patagonia, North Face, TripOutside, that contribute to a general pool of conservation funds to keep wild places wild. We’re really excited that we get to contribute a portion of all of our bookings to help conserve these lands that we recreate on,” Julie adds.
Giving Travelers More Visibility Into Hotel Prices
Hotel shopping can be frustrating because the same room may cost different prices across various platforms. GetDirecto is a browser extension that compares prices as users search for hotels. The browser extension launched in 2023 and has been used by over 300,000 users.
“With the extension, the user doesn’t really have to change their behavior very much. They can still go to the site that they usually use, whether it’s Booking.com, Airbnb, or whatever they choose to search on. But the extension is always on — it’s already there. So the user only has to do a search like they normally do, and the price comparisons will start coming up to them directly. They don’t have to press any additional buttons,” says Marina Guastavino, the co-founder of GetDirecto.
The reasons these prices vary are that booking platforms have different commission rates. Hotels may have different commercial agreements with each platform.
“Which makes the exact same room more expensive on one place and cheaper on the other. The consumer doesn’t really know why there are these different prices. This information needs to get out there to the traveler to actually help them make a better decision,” Marina explains. “We do have some negotiated rates that you won’t find publicly, but you do have to have the extension to access them because they’re for the private group of users that we have.”
GetDirecto is committed to providing its users the best possible deal, and its goal is to reach 1 million users within a year.
Taking the Stress Out of Planning
All three digital platforms help eliminate the frustration of booking a successful, enjoyable trip. Whether a traveler is planning a honeymoon, an outdoor adventure, or comparing hotel prices, technological tools are helping them find the best trip at the right price.
