18 Jul 08
Map your trips with EnTrip
Anthony Hsiao, a German-Taiwanese Entrepreneur, who studied Electrical Engineering at Imperial College and ETH Zurich, co-founded a very interesting Start-Up called EnTrip a couple of months ago. EnTrip allows its users to create and share trips using a map-based approach. Their interface is built on Google Maps and combines travel information with social community contents, such as Flickr and Facebook.
I talked to Anthony today and we had a great discussion on how travel behavior might develop over the next few years. Personally I am convinced that travel will become much more personal than in the last decades of mass tourism and all-inclusive hotels. Start-Ups like EnTrip can benefit from this trend and create services that allow customers to share their travel experiences with their friends in a better way. In the following, I will write about some of the opportunities and the obstacles to overcome that I see, when looking at EnTrip.
Opportunities:
- EnTrip has a unique interface, which is definitely a USP from a technological point of view
- As Travel is getting personal, the big players in the field will look for innovative Web 2.0 solutions that allows customers to share information and open new sales channels for their products
- EnTrip is based in India, a very vibrant environment for a start-up and a great place to learn (and last, but not least cost efficient)
- EnTrip could be integrated as a white-label solution
Obstacles to overcome:
- Monetization: It is not figured out yet, how the revenue stream can be generated. EnTrip will have to come up with a viable model that bridges the gap between the interface and the revenue stream.
- Usability: Although the map is the unique feature of EnTrip, at GetYourGuide we have made the experience that many users have a hard time using Google Maps efficiently. A critical question will be how EnTrip can improve their feature so that less people get confused or lost.
In any case, we are looking forward hearing about EnTrip and could well imagine to collaborate closely in the future.
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Hey Johannes,
thanks a lot for that blog, good analysis I’d say, and I’m definitly, just like you I presume, looking forwards to the future – and how the market, user behaviour and the (online)world in general will change over the coming years!