Some travelers may like hunting Gila monsters in the desert; others may prefer parasailing in Paraguay; some just want to be beached with a book.
But a good many travelers who turn to the Internet for travel information either don't know where they want to go or are out of ideas about things to do.
And the online travel shopper looking for inspiration has long been frustrated by destination-oriented websites that some, such as industry analyst Henry Harteveldt, believe are more difficult to navigate than they need to be.
But in the online-offline battle for travelers' attention, the founders of TravelMuse.com have taken the "inspiration" part to heart, launching an online effort that they contend will bring to travel planning exactly what's been lacking: a meld of writer-driven, magazine-like editorial content coupled with travel search, shopping and booking all in one place.
Co-founder and CEO Kevin Fliess, a former executive at business software company SAP, has big ambitions for the new site.
"We want to be the household name in travel planning," he said.
The idea for TravelMuse started some 13 months ago when Fliess and other former SAP employees started looking at the travel space for opportunities. He said financial backer Azure Capital pushed them toward creating an "online concierge service."
Fliess noted that Harteveldt's comments late last year that the travel industry was "standing still" when it came to giving online travelers new options hit home, because the company was already trying to address those issues.
"A lot of us are very time-constrained, and vacation time is precious," Fliess said. "People want a quick and easy way to determine where they want to take a vacation."
'Making better decisions'
TravelMuse.com launched earlier this month for public beta testing, with a feature it calls the Inspiration Finder. It attempts to stimulate that inspiration by combining travel writing and recommendations from some 50 freelance journalists with the ability to go beyond what is described there, all the way to photos and descriptions of the places they talk about.
"Inspiration comes in the editorial content, in the ability to immerse yourself into the content and have an armchair travel experience," he said. "The second part is the Inspiration Finder. In a couple of seconds you can enter in your personal preference, your budget, the accommodation class, how far you want to travel and what kind of experience you want."
The site then provides individual destination options based on those preferences, narrowed from the very start by how much a traveler wants to spend.
"The data we have seen is that roughly 20% of online travelers don't know where they want to go when planning a vacation, so the planning piece is all about saving time and making better decisions," Fliess said.
From editorial suggestions, users can jump from destination information to drill down to the level of individual hotels (some 90,000 are represented on the site), flight possibilities available, restaurants, all the way through to activity bookings.
Booking through the site is subcontracted through a third-party supplier, World Choice Travel, a subsidiary of Travelocity.
The majority of the site's 50 freelance writers will contribute to new content each week, and that content is integrated with travel destination guides that are also licensed from a third-party supplier.
Some 200 domestic and international destinations are represented on the site so far, accounting for about 95% of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
The site also allows collaborative travel planning and provides users the ability to take information from other sites and include it in the travelers' portfolio of options and potential itineraries.