by Vas Mylko

Officially, software has been eating the world since October 2000, when Marc Andreessen said it in CRN interview. The adage was popularized a decade later when he published an essay in “The Wall Street Journal” in 2011. Software was eating travel since 1985, when Sabre launched eAAsy. Then, it was a distinctive 20 years era of online travel. That era is saturating after big mergers and acquisitions by Booking Holding and IAC & Expedia Group.

New era has started already. In the new era, travel is being eaten by software disruptors (Airbnb, Uber) and software giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon). There are also Apple and Microsoft. We have researched and predicted travel evolution in our Travel Trio 2020 research, back in October 2018. Back then we have predicted Google, Airbnb, Facebook as top dogs. Now it’s time to re-iterate how travel industry evolves and where we are in it.

Airbnb, Google, Amazon

Airbnb already offers home sharing, boutique hotels, experiences, dining. Since 2016 Airbnb worked on the idea of launching flights, on their way to become a super brand in travel. Airbnb created Transportation Division in February 2019, headed by an aviation professional. Will Airbnb buy Hopper or partner with Skyscanner for flight booking? Airbnb bought HotelsTonight in March 2018. Will Airbnb buy Hopper or an airline? My personal vision is that Hopper will be bought by Google, because Google loves much data, science, and Hopper worked on flight data since 2007.

Google launched Google Travel on 14th of May, 2019. Google is combining all its travel planning features under a site called Trips (though the URL is google.com/travel). The page named Trips ties their travel products — Google Travel Guides, Google Trips mobile app, Google Flights, Google Hotels & Restaurants search. There are independent travel experiments in Google’s Area51, one of them is Touring Bird. Which looks like an attempt to build a competitive offering against Airbnb Experiences, by using Viator, GetYourGuie and Klook experiences and activities, and self-guided tours.

Facebook did not make any loud movements since October 2018, despite very promising job descriptions. Facebook stayed in travel ads so far. After three failures to enter travel during a decade, we didn’t put Amazon into the top three.

Amazon has entered the stage. Two days after Google Travel launch, Amazon launched flight booking in India. It is an experiment, via a partnership with Cleartrip. Three first attempts were homemade. New attempt is via the partnership. There is big chance that Amazon could buy Expedia, they both are located in the Seattle region. Or TripAdvisor, which will be cheaper. What’s clear is that Amazon is going to be back, and it’s not going to be a new homemade attempt.

Apple, Uber, Microsoft

Apple is sluggish but moving towards travel. They patent everything they can before implementing it. The pace is really slow, since iTravel app law suits. But Apple is in the game, at least with check-in with iPhone like payments with it.

Uber experimented a lot for several years. They tried UberTOUR in Italy, in Rome and Milan. They tried Uber Tour Guides, some of them are still live in Jaipur, Dubai, Beirut, Amman. They tried UberWINE for Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. They are experimenting with intercity in India, with Uber Intercity product for getaways, for families, and others. Looks like India is a good place to test something before launching it in the US. Uber launched public transport option in Denver and London. It doesn’t look like Uber could do something big in travel during the next few years, despite its C-level is ex-Expedia.

Uber Public Transport for London

Microsoft already did in travel back in 1996. Expedia was born at Microsoft, it was spun-off in 1999. Recently Microsoft announced a manifesto for corporate travel. That’s it.

Superapps

Superapp is a strategy. Superapp is a new trend probably. The pace of zillion small stand-alone apps for very specific [or same] purposes is slowing down. Time of a single app that you could do everything from is coming. Small apps must integrate with superapps.

Amazon wants to be a superapp, the mobile tool of choice to book flights, buy books, and make payments. In travel, flights are only the beginning. — Dennis Schaal

Who from big software tech giants have superapps? Google has. Google Search itself is kind of superapp. Google Maps is definitely the superapp for travel already. Amazon app is the superapp. And Amazon confirms its superapp strategy. Facebook is the superapp. Facebook is the richest app from them all. I predict much more to come from Facebook, and Facebook within the top three travel drivers after 2020.

WeChat Superapp

Apple doesn’t have a superapp. iTunes is not the superapp despite it’s fat enough. Apple has Superdevice. Apple iPhone is the superdevice. Highly popular, especially in developed countries, within the middle class and upscale. Having superdevice you don’t need a superapp. Google and Amazon are pushing with conversational voice devices within their superdevice strategies (Amazon Alexa, Google Home).

Superapps are conceptually new operating systems. Ironically, the concept of the Superapp is best represented by Chinese WeChat (by Tencent), not by Google or Amazon or Facebook. Chinese already made it, and Western tech companies are trying to replicate it.

Experience

The biggest travel sites and their mobile apps are designed to do just one thing: sell you flights, hotel rooms. But when you’re traveling for leisure, you don’t go to sit on planes and sleep in hotels. You travel for what happens between the flying and the sleeping: experiences. Planning a trip that maximizes the quality of these experiences is more valuable than getting a good deal on a flight or hotel. But it’s much tougher to do. That experience is not the same as activities/tours/experiences.

Travel experience planning is about to get a lot easier, with Curiosio: tell it what you’re interested in, trip details such as your start/finish locations, dates and budget, and Curiosio proposes a made-to-fit itinerary. During your trip, its POI radar, compass, and destination gaming features get you where you want to go, and having fun along the way. And after your trip is done, Curiosio’s features let you relive and share highlights of your trip at any time.

Curiosio works on top of our own knowledge graph today. It could be pointed to another knowledge graph of POIs, inventory of activities and rooms. Curiosio has started from road trips, because road tripping is the most impressive and most flexible way to experience the world. It’s possible to drive own car, rent a car, or call a car via API. Uber allows 4h rides, there is Uber API, Curiosio tries to keep intercity rides under 4h. Trip themes will be added later. Currently, Curiosio makes sure you are not missing a unique city vibe.

Experience is built from See & Do. There are three groups of basic inventory: POIs, activities, rooms. POIs are gathered into knowledge graphs, places graphs. Rooms are consolidated by Booking, Airbnb, Expedia and their other brands. Activities/tours start from wrappers around POIs — tickets, guides, VIP service — and stretch to people-to-people experiences — and further to stand-alone tours with overnight stay and meal.

GetYourGuide and Klook are cataloging activities all over the world, Klook more focused on Asia. Both took huge money from SoftBank recently: GetYourGuide took $484M, Klook took $225M. Google Travel Guides are connected to GYG, Klook and Viator. Airbnb Experiences are standalone. There are newer inventories of activities/tours, but focused on centennials and millennials, e.g. Fever.

Conclusion

Modern software giants enter the travel industry. They are starting from the bottom, from commodity, from distribution of flights, hotels, and packages (usually flights+hotel, could be flight+hotel+car). Google tries to connect to the inventories of activities. Airbnb is pushing on its own. Nobody is building for a true traveler’s experience. Despite the boom of activities/tours, diverse rooms, travel remains mass-produced.

Curiosio allows to search for a unique trip from scratch, or take a trip you love, and build your trip on top of it. It’s Supertrips concept. You list locations of interest in plain text, in English Wikipedia naming, specify the duration in days, budget in US dollars, and the number of travelers. You could add new waypoints, or remove some original ones. Once you’ve done with the list, you search with Curiosio for a trip in those constraints. By discovering what’s possible and how, you manipulate search results to find what suits you best.

Curiosio is a new search engine for travelers, focused on experience. Travelers can imagine and find a most relevant trip, in any geography, any start and finish locations, any desired waypoints, within any time and any budget. The traveler could manipulate search results and do re-entrant search to iteratively find what she wants. It’s always possible to modify trip plan from now till the end of the trip. Curiosio is knowledge graph agnostic, could plug any inventory of POIs, activities, rooms in. Curiosio could export trip plans to Google Maps and Google Docs.

Experience-focused travel search is very complicated. There is no ground truth for this kind of knowledge. It’s astronomically enormous combinatorial complexity, known as NP-complete in computer science. Curiosio is powered by AI engine called Ingeenee. We built special AI to move travel from mass-produced to personal. As soon as the technology is scaled to the US (and US+CA geo cluster), the R&D phase could be considered as done. The new software will eat travel.