PlanetEye: A One-Stop Travel Destination
Today, the Toronto-based travel site PlanetEye officially launched its new travel planning service, which combines extensive travel content, booking, mapping, and geotagged photo sharing. PlanetEye aims to be a one-stop travel destination, where users can prepare for a vacation, book it, and share their experiences after returning from the trip. To provide all of this, PlanetEye has partnered with TraveloCity, OpenTable, StubHub, WaySpa, and Microsoft.
Travel Packs and Content
While the focus for many travel sites has been on providing just one service, be it guidebook content, booking, or photo sharing, PlanetEye aims to bring all of this together. The central focus of the service is the so called "Travel Pack," where users can store content they clip from anywhere on the site. That content could be one of the geotagged images that appear on PlanetEye's Microsoft powered maps, an article about a local sight, or a restaurant review.
Even though PlanetEye is still a very young site, it already features a lot of exclusive content. While its hotel and restaurant database pretty much covers every possible destination world-wide, the best content on PlanetEye is written by its Local Experts, though this is only available for some of the most popular destinations like Rome or San Francisco.
Maps
PlanetEye has licensed technology from Microsoft's World-Wide Media eXchange program, which powers its maps. Indeed, PlanetEye's maps are, besides the Travel Pack, one of PlanetEye's most useful features in planning a trip, as they are directly coupled with its database of restaurants, sights, and geotagged images, all of which are dynamically updated as your scroll through the map. One other nice aspect of these maps is that they are always interactive, no matter where they appear on the site.
Mobile
One feature that is still missing from PlanetEye is a mobile interface. PlanetEye features a lot of good travel content that could be very useful during a trip, but its interface doesn't lend itself easily to browsing on a mobile phone. According to PlanetEye, a mobile version will be released this year.
Verdict
A lot of features on PlanetEye are similar to those of other recent start-ups in this space, including Tripwolf, TravelMuse, and NileGuide. None of these services, however, combine all of them together into one package the way PlanetEye does. The only service that comes relatively close to PlanetEye's feature set is TripAdvisor, though PlanetEye puts a lot more emphasis on mapping and its user interface is a lot more fluid and flexible.
Comments
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Frederic,
While we've certainly come a long way in recent months, we're really excited about the new features coming later this year, so stay tuned. :)
Mark
This is indeed a very interesting travel site. A lot of very nice features - and extremely easy to use. I see they lack some content still, but I am sure that will fill up quickly.
I am managing a Norwegian travel site myself and must admit I have already noted several ideas we might look closer into.
I believe planeteye was originally started by students from the U of T but now seems to be run by a hand picked crew...did the vc money drive out the founding team?
This website sucks. You can as well go to Panoramio to see pictures of places. The hotels that they recommend are all 5-star as if taken from some YelloPages book. There are no reviews, just links to websites, the design is not good.
I don't get it: why is there so much hype when somebody just mashes some data up, is it "cool" now just to put something together even if it doesn't make sense? The web needs some more creativity, especially the travel sector. I'm tired of ad-ridden websites like TripAdvisor and the likes. The only good project I've seen since a long time is http://ivebeenthere.co.uk by The Guardian Group – that is a good example of a simple design, collaborative approach, and original idea.
I think it's time to stop the hype once somebody mashes something up and start looking into how original and useful the idea _really_ is. Otherwise we'll end up constantly reproducing already existing content without adding any value to it (or at least – the context if that's what what the new Web is about).
If you wanted to travel to northern England you would not get much help from this site. It takes at least some 'personal' attention to put together interesting features of a town/area. They have not gotten there, yet. For example, the photos for Durham England do not include photos of either the castle or the cathedral. There is a picture of a bridge. I do not know how a site like this gets from here to where they would be helpful other than, perhaps, the large tourist hotspots. But they surely need to make progress.
@ John: Much of the original team that came out of UofT are still with PlanetEye.
@ Bob Boynton: Thanks for the feedback. While are destination database is pretty extensive, there's plenty of room to grow it. Going forward, we're looking for PlanetEye members to help us by contributing travel photographs and content.
cheers, Mark
Deemeetree:
Mashups can be very useful for users.
Users want to get the most in one place.
tripwolf will soon offer a trip planning tool, where users can book flights and hotels. Making it a one-stop shop for travelers