Stay.com: A Killer Domain For A Social Travel Planner With Some Potential

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... → Learn More

EuropaReiser is today launching the free public beta version of Stay.com, a service that lets people plan their travels and share those plans with others.

Of course, there are lots of websites and applications one can use to find out what to do when visiting a city, but Stay.com admittedly makes things very easy and quite fun for the 50 cities it currently features on the site.

All you need to is enter your destination city, e.g. Brussels, and up pops a list of activites, like museums you can visit or restaurants where you can get some decent food.

At the tap of a button, you can get a downloadable guide (PDF) of activities and venues along with a map, photos, addresses, opening hours and more. You can also customize those guides with items you select from a pre-populated list of venues, hotels, restaurants and attractions, and share your personalized guide with the world via Stay.com, Facebook and Twitter.

Likewise, you can discover custom guides for cities that other people have created before you.

Stay.com also handily integrates content from a range of travel information providers: TripAdvisor for ratings and reviews, and TopTable and OpenTable for easy restaurant reservations, just to name a few.

The startup promises much more is coming now that the service has launched in public beta form; on the roadmap we find user-added venues and places, third-party sharing widgets, full mobile integration, geo-location features, video guides and more. Stay.com promises the site will remain ad-free as the site grows in terms of functionality; the money it makes from hotel bookings from the main website should be enough to build a business, they reckon.

Other services that let you build custom travel guides one way or another include YourTour, Offbeat Guides, NileGuide, TripIt and Dopplr.

Website: stay.com

Stay.com, a EuropaReiser AS brand, is a social travel site that provides internet-based hotel booking and travel services to end-consumers worldwide. The brand is 70% owned by Braganza AS, a privately held investment company, owner of Braathens, the leading domestic airline in Norway. Joachim Paasche, CEO of Stay.com, and his partners at Braganza AS, have extensive experience in the travel business in Scandinavia, the EU and worldwide.

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