One European company that picked the TechCrunch50 conference to launch a service was DemoPit participant deciZium, which launched its travel planning website YourTour in public beta and gave the audience a demo of its capabilities during the event’s breaks.
Granted, there are a lot of travel-related websites and applications out there which makes it quite difficult to come up with something unique in this space, but YourTour does have a number of interesting features that deserve a second look. In essence, the website offers personalized travel planning assistance based on one’s wishes, preferences and limitations.
To use the service, you need to enter some basic coordinates like destinations and dates after which a custom tour which will be automatically calculated and presented, based on tens of thousands of records for activities and places in the YourTour database. At this moment, YourTour only supports custom itineraries and plans for travels to France, but more countries are underway.
The idea is that by merely inputting basic information, YourTour will tell you what you can do during the time you are there, so you don’t need to figure that out for yourself using printed guides or multiple websites. You can always finetune results by indicating how many people are joining you for travel, whether you’re bringing children, what time you plan to get up every day, your budget, what your interests are (culture, nature, sports, shopping, etc.) and how much time per day you’d like to spend doing any activities at all. Once you’ve rebuilt a travel planning guide to your satisfaction, you can book the entire tour by clicking just one button (in collaboration with Booking.com).
Ultimately, deciZium aims to market its YourTour service as a white label solution for tourism agencies, hotel chains and other travel industry pros to offer a tailor-made travel planning service to their customers directly. A pilot application is currently being tested by BEST Tours.
Personally, I think part of the charm of travelling is looking up what to do once I’m at my destination, trusting fate or recommendations from people on the spot. However, I think in the end there will always be people who like everything getting laid out for them nice and easy, and I could definitely see such people paying YourTour a visit. If enough people will do that for YourTour to become a viable business, remains the question of course.
