Mapping the best and worst seats in hundreds of airplanes, SeatGuru is one of our favourite examples of transparency tyranny—the power of detailed information to help consumers find the best of the best and leave the rest behind. So we were pleased to hear about TripKick, a similar venture that's tackling another aspect of travel: hotel rooms. While TripAdvisor (which acquired SeatGuru in 2007) gives travellers access to detailed hotel reviews by other travellers, who occasionally include info on which rooms to book, there's definitely an opportunity in getting specific about individual rooms.
TripKick—"your hotel sidekick"—launched with about 250 hotels in 10 US cities, with more to follow. Coverage of each hotel includes detailed information on which rooms to request: which rooms are oversized (rooms ending in 03 and 04, for example), which have great bathrooms or are quieter than others. TripKick, which spent a year gathering all of this information, also points out which floors are better, and which to avoid. Guests are encouraged to add their own reviews and upload photos of rooms they've stayed in.
Given they chose a name that isn't specifically tied to hotels, we wouldn't be surprised to see TripKick branch out to other areas of travel, too. If you're in the hotel business, there's more reason than ever to ensure that each of your rooms has something special to offer. Run a restaurant? Time to make your best tables stand out and rule out any such thing as a bad table. For more tips on how to turn transparency tyranny into transparency triumph, check out the opportunities section of trendwatching.com's briefing on the subject.
Website: www.tripkick.com
Contact: contact@tripkick.com
Spotted by: Grace Hodder
More than just a time to renew body and spirit, vacations can also be opportunities to learn something new or try out different careers, as we've noted before. For guests at Ritz-Carlton hotels worldwide, they can now also be a time to give back to the local community.
Last month Ritz-Carlton launched its Give Back Getaways program, which gives guests the opportunity to volunteer their time to improve and assist the local community in which they are vacationing. At The Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, for example, guests can join a biologist from the Cancun Department of Ecology for hands-on experience protecting mother sea turtles during nesting and helping them return safely to the sea. Through a program employees have already been participating in for more than a decade, guests will head out at night to search for nesting turtles, gather sea turtle eggs and bring them to a safer location. Visitors to Berlin, meanwhile, can roll up their sleeves and accompany hotel staff as they launch a spring clean-up of the SONNENHOF facilities for children with serious illnesses. Additional Give Back Getaways include cooking and serving meals at the North Texas Food Bank; restoring homes in the ancient water town of Wuzhen, China; planting native Cyprus trees in the dwindling wetland forests of the Florida Everglades; and building homes with Habitat for Humanity in Jakarta and New Orleans. Costs vary between roughly USD 50 and USD 150 per adult participant.
Simon F. Cooper, Ritz-Carlton's president and chief operating officer, explains: “We have come to recognize the interest many of our guests have in becoming more involved in the region where they are spending their vacation. Many of them are active volunteers in worthwhile activities at home, and want to continue this spirit of giving when they visit other parts of the world. We believe Give Back Getaways is a unique way for our hotels to partner with guests to provide an experience both memorable and personally enriching.”
Experience, of course, is what it's all about, as the hotel goes beyond furnishing a purely functional place to stay to give guests a lasting, potentially transforming experience they'll remember forever. Long live the experience economy—and the companies that make it happen!
Website: www.givebackgetaways.com
Contact: www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Contact/InfoRequest.htm
Spotted by: RK
Summer music festivals tend to create recurring, short-term demand for accommodations, as we noted last year when we wrote about Boutique Camping. Now a new, student-invented contender also in the UK offers two-person festival tents made from recyclable materials.
Camping at festivals can be a soggy and uncomfortable affair, and tents often get dumped at the festival's end, sending them to landfills. myhab, on the other hand, offers waterproof accommodations that can be entirely recycled. Made from ultra-tough recycled plastic and waterproof cardboard, each myhab tent features a raised base and access from both ends. Also included are a double mattress and lockable box, along with extra space for muddy boots and other festival equipment. Festival-goers begin by reserving their myhab tents for the festival they plan to attend; pricing is GBP 240 per myhab, or GBP 120 per person. They can even personalize it with exterior graphics to make it their own, selecting a funky character online, that the myhab staff will print out and affix to the outside of their tent. Next, all they do is show up at the festival and check into the myvillage, where they receive a myhab wrist band that gains them continuing access. Tents are set up ahead of time by the myhab team, which staffs the myvillage round the clock and also maintains showers and bathrooms on-site. Once the festival is over, myhab breaks down and recycles its tents for next time.
myhab plans to be present at all the big UK music festivals this summer, with up to 250 myhab tents in each myvillage. Brand sponsorships and corporate events are also available. With additional possibilities for weddings and a multitude of other summer events, there are plenty of opportunities for a service like this around the world!
Website: www.myhab.com
Contact: more@myhab.com
Spotted by: Jack Morrell
Who hasn't returned from a trip laden with cheap, tacky souvenirs? In the hopes of keeping more such items out of the dustbin—where they inevitably end up—Canada's Souvenir Shop offers redesigned, recrafted and upgraded Canadian souvenirs.
Created by Toronto's Gladstone Hotel and Motherbrand, a design firm dedicated to preserving Canada's local culture, Souvenir Shop features a range of specialty and limited-edition items crafted by Canadian designers. The site's Maple Leaves Lamp, for example, was created by Ani+Lumigrane and Frédéric Guibrunet of cut paper; pricing is CDN 250. Ouno Designs' Fur Lifejacket, meanwhile, is a conversation piece made from reclaimed Hudson Bay Company Furs' mink and priced at CDN 500. Then there's the Pierre Trudeau doll, crafted of felt and available in a variety of outfits, priced at CDN 100. Jewellery, books, housewares and clothes are also available for shipping both domestically and internationally.
Is there anything under the sun that can't be upgraded? We think not! How about bringing this approach to the souvenirs from a region near you?
Website: www.thesouvenirshop.ca
Contact: souvenirshop@motherbrand.com
Spotted by: Sheri Allain
Travellers who need internet access on the road typically have two choices: either limit their use to the confines of hotel or café wifi—which can be pricey—or subscribe to long-term and expensive broadband data card services. New York-based RovAir now offers a third option with its day-pass wireless mobile broadband service.
Founded last fall, RovAir provides wireless mobile broadband aircards, data cards and evdo cards for internet access without an extended contract. To do that, the company itself maintains the necessary long-term subscriptions for data services with Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. It then offers those services in a day-pass format for those who need short-term but continuous access on the road. Coverage extends anywhere the provider's cellular range goes, which can be searched on RovAir's site. RovAir will ship the data card to the consumer express or by courier, and also provide return packaging. Costs depend on the number of days of use, beginning at USD 5.95 per day. There is a three-day minimum.
Until wireless access is universally available and universally free, there will clearly be demand for a variety of plans like RovAir's. More choice is always a good thing—who will bring it to mobile warriors in the rest of the world?
Website: www.rovair.com
Contact: sales@rovair.com
Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen
Earlier this year we wrote about Walkit, an advanced route planner for UK pedestrians, and now Simpatigo has launched a similar service in the US that adds a wealth of information about local attractions.
Simpatigo creates personalized tour guides complete with directions and markers for attractions along the way. Users select beginning and ending points for the trip they'd like to take, along with which categories of attractions they're interested in—historical, budget, kid-oriented or restaurants, for example. Simpatigo then returns map-based driving or walking instructions along with descriptions of the relevant points of interest along the route. Not only can users search for and get travel routes, but—in Wikitravel fashion—they can also input local attractions of their own, which then get added to those Simpatigo includes on its routes. So, a user seeking to get directions from point A to point B in San Francisco, for example, will see not just a standard list of mainstream attractions described by sources like the New York Times and TripAdvisor.com, but also others that have been input and described by users.
Simpatigo is still rough around the edges, with attractions listed mostly just for select, well-populated areas in the United States, but its premise is a good one, promising to give users focused, relevant information along with a way to shape what others see. As the site gains traction, advertisers and local businesses will surely be clamouring to add their own locations as points of interest. After all, the restaurateur who skips an opportunity to reach users who have specifically said they're interested in local restaurants may not be a restaurateur for long...! ;-)
Website: www.simpatigo.com
Contact: ted@simpatigo.com
Last November, we featured Picnics on the Piste, a high-end catering firm that organizes gourmet meals for skiers right on the mountainsides of plush winter resorts in Austria, France and Switzerland. While affluent travellers increasingly seek out memorable experiences of the kind Picnics on the Piste offers, an even larger market exists for companies that can make it faster and easier for vacationers to buy everyday foods and household supplies for their holiday abode.
A new UK firm, Snowman’s Larder, is helping pioneer that niche in two neighbouring French ski resorts: Val d'Isère and Tignes. Customers can order online before they leave home, select a delivery time, then wait for their order upon reaching their apartment or chalet. To be sure, provisioning services have been around for a long time. Whether you’re vacationing in a time-share unit, motor home or sailing yacht, companies can set you up with food and supplies in just about any major resort area. But Snowman’s Larder is unique in several respects: the company says it can save travellers money by shopping in resort-area supermarkets instead of the higher-priced convenience stores at the resorts themselves, which shows how it has taken a business model skewed toward the affluent and adapted it to average vacationers. Snowman’s Larder’s also caters specifically to UK travellers, providing them with foods they’re familiar with.
Plenty of variations could work with this model, of course. If British food works in the French Alps, for example, kosher meals might just as easily work in the Colorado Rockies. The trick, in either case, is finding potential customers without spending much on marketing. Solve that issue and you might find yourself running a profitable company in the kind of location others can only dream of. (Related: Helping parents travel lighter.)
Website: www.snowmans-larder.com
Contact: info@snowmans-larder.net
Spotted by: Katie Rowen
Tarzan fans have long yearned for the ability to swing from the trees like the Lord of the Jungle, and in recent years new opportunities to do just that have arisen around the world. Most recently one of our spotters came across Go Ape, a UK-based park that first launched in 2002 and has since expanded to 16 locations throughout Britain. Each of Go Ape's award-winning high forest adventure parks is essentially a network of rope bridges, trapezes and zip slides that stretches for roughly a mile through the tree canopy. Visitors can climb trees, slide across high wires, crawl through tunnels, cross rope bridges, swing on Tarzan swings and walk over planks before zipping down to the ground again. All users are fitted with a climbing harness and given instruction before undertaking the course, which takes approximately 2.5 to 3 hours to complete. Entry is GBP 25 for adults and GBP for children 17 and under; the minimum age is 10.
In Lyon, France, City Aventure operates two parks that also offer a variety of high-forest adventures. Attractions include rope bridges and Tarzan swings, along with the Tyro X-speed at Ste. Foy, a giant Tyrolean traverse 110 metres long that visitors can use to zip throughout the 4-hectare park. The courses take between 1 and 2 hours to complete. Both parks are built with environmental preservation in mind, including fastening systems that do not interfere with the trees' normal growth.
Adrenalin Forest in Christchurch, New Zealand, spans more than 1km with 4 pathways between 1.5 and 17 meters off the ground. Visitors to the park, which launched last year, negotiate a series of rope bridges, Tarzan swings and flying foxes from platforms constructed in the tree canopy. Last but not least, Thailand's Tree Top Adventure Park, set in the forest of Koh Chang, also offers an assortment of rope bridges, Tarzan swings and giant zip lines.
In this age of eco-awareness and experience-seeking, high-forest adventure parks like these offer consumers a way to satisfy both and gain some status skills to boot. One to bring to your neck of the woods?
Website: www.goape.co.uk — www.cityaventure.com — www.adrenalin-forest.co.nz — www.ekohchang.com
Contacts: businessdevelopment@goape.co.uk — info@cityaventure.com — contact@adrenalin-forest.co.nz — info@ekohchang.com
Spotted by: Junaid Kazi
