Maybe I'm just hearing what I wanted to hear, but in the past few months all I hear about on online travel are in someway related to research & planning, especially social research & planning.  These are information from industry news sites and tech blogs I read on a regular basis and from friends and former colleagues calling to say they are launching or joining companies in guess what, travel research & planning.

To get a sense of how hallucinated I really am, I went to TechCrunch to see what they have actually been covering on online travel in the last few months.  Here is what I came up with:

The video guys (tripr.tv, tvtrip, trivop) on the list are obviously in the travel research area for providing richer content to help travelers make better hotel choices.

The social networking sites (wayn,  hereorthere, dopplr) are all about sharing travel plans with friends, or planning better trips with new and old friends.

TripIt helps you manage your personal itinary better.  And yapta provides a similar serivce but also helps you save some money on flights while you are at it.

Here is how TC describes vibeagent:

The easiest way to describe the site is as a more social TripAdvisor, which the company clearly wants to take down. Currently the site only deals with hotels, though. Members can log on to post reviews, ask questions, finding travel agents, and use some new features like mapping their trips. The system expresses a clear network effect, getting better at recommendations as you and your friends put more in the system.

Clearly, this company aims at helping you do a better job in finding good hotels.  I would put Kango in the same category, since it aggregates contents from many sites like vibeagent (tripadvisor, yahoo travel, etc.) and provides a semantic search service on top of that.

It might be a bit of a stretch (okay, a lot of stretch), but since kayak acquired sidestep which acquired tripup and travelpost before itself was acquired, kayak is also in the travel research & planning space, even if you don't want to call meta-search travel research :).

Besides the companies listed above, I also often hear about realtravel (TC 10/13/2006), triphub (TC 08/07/2006), triporama, nilesguide, and our own technology powered groopvine.  And all these services are pure play travel research or planning or both.

Maybe I am not all that hallucinated after all.  The booking thing in travel has been done already (expedia, travelocity, orbitz, etc.).  Even variations of the booking thing have been done (hotwire, priceline, lastminute).  People are buying travel online, now they need help to improve their online buying experience.

Social, research, planning.  These words has been on our mind, the collective mind of go1000 that is, since late 2005.  We spent a good two years, heads down, to build a killer social research & planning service for the Chinese market.  Now that we have re-launched, I hope the time for social travel research & planning has finally arrived in 2008 :).