Toozla

Toozla is a unique service that supplies online location-based content to users' mobile devices in real time.

Independent travel accounts for an ever-growing share of the global tourism market. In line with this trend, we have created a unique service to make life easier for the independent traveller in an unfamiliar city.

The service – called Toozla – provides users with location-based content in real time. Via their mobile devices, tourists can receive audio and text guides relating to their current location at any given moment. The volume and relevance of the information supplied depend on the options chosen by the user, and the speed at which he or she is moving. Human guides are a thing of the past, because the Toozla virtual guide is available to the user at all times, and the cost of using it is unrivalled.

With Toozla, tourists can also use their mobile device to create their own audio commentaries for their current location, which other users can then immediately access. In this way, an interactive tour guide is formed out of travellers' own experiences. Toozla is a new way to explore the world.

Furthermore, Toozla marks the start of a new era for mobile, online location-based advertising (LBA). Companies can now send targeted messages to potential customers at the moment they come within walking distance of the company's sales outlet. For example, hotels can inform users of room availability, while restaurants can provide them with details of the day's specials.

Nimbus Airlines

Nimbus Airlines; Your other national airline

Nimbus Airlines is a new consumer airline and although in its formative stages a first class, experienced executive / senior management team has already been identified. It is being organized to take advantage of a specific gap in the short-haul European business travel market.

Nimbus Airlines will serve European Short haul routes taking advantage of routes poorly served between Scotland and major European cities. The aircraft will be single class and will extend a unique premium economy service to its guests. However prices will be competitive to rival so called Low Cost carriers. Despite the financial crisis at the moment, we believe now is the time to begin setting up an airline due to the lead-time required to gain certification and train staff. Also, lease prices for aircraft are reducing, and competitors are rationalising their routes, which works in our favour.

Seen Mobile Media

Travelling with the right mobile content

The evolution of the mobile phone from personal communication tool to online device has created huge possibilities for the travel industry. To address this new market, you need the right content: mobile friendly, highly personalised, revenue generating.

Seen has launched a B2B mobile solution to increase the reach and value of your digital content assets, enabling you to create multiple dynamic mobile travel services from a single pool of content.

Recognising that mobile isn't a smaller version of a website, and that building separate mobile applications is inefficient, Seen has developed a unique ‘Mobile as a Service' (MaaS) platform. Designed as a cost effective way to create mobile services on demand, Seen's MaaS environment gives you the ability to leverage content assets to maximum effect, turning mobile applications ‘on and off’ without extra cost.

This new model provides you with enormous flexibility and economies of scale in deployment, management and support of, for example, highly targeted mobile guides. As a result ‘pop up’ markets, such as Carnival or Valentine's Day, can be addressed with relative ease. Mobile users can personalise their service further, yielding rich insights on consumer preferences, service value and trends.

Seen's MaaS model is applicable and revenue generating across the travel industry. For those looking for new value-added services to enhance your consumers' travel experience, Seen also provides access to branded content from a leading travel publisher or white-label travel guide content. For publishers, Seen provides an editorial management system for you to create dynamic, location-aware mobile content, which can be accessed directly by your consumers or distributed to partners for use within their own mobile services.

Uncle Sam's New York

Uncle Sam's New York Tours is the flagship franchise of Uncle Sam's USA Tours, a company that produces a new brand of “Social Tours” that serve the growing wave movement of independent travel.

The rise of independent travel is transforming the global travel industry. As more people forsake the concept of packaged tours and group travel, they are missing the camaraderie and social experience that these traditional models of touring have provided. Over 92% of the 47 million visitors to New York City travel without children. Most of these guests spend time and money on nightlife activities, but they lack the local knowledge, and more importantly, the social group that many travelers find necessary to enjoy bars and nightlife.

Uncle Sam's New York operates under the assumption that people travel not to see “the sights,” but to experience the culture of the host country and to meet both locals and other travelers from across the world. Uncle Sam's New York is the first company in New York City to offer interactive, daily, publically scheduled, and guided walking tours, evening bar tours, and night club tours across New York City. These tours provide guests a licensed tour guide, a free photographer, and facilitated interaction with other travelers while sampling the rich history, culture, and glamorous nightlife of New York City.

Uncle Sam's New York is first to market with a schedule of daily walking tours, daily evening pub crawls, and a series of weekend nightlife tours. We are the only company delivering these products that has signed contracts with mass wholesalers of travel such as Virgin Holidays, Gulliver Travels (GTA), Allied T-Pro, Expedia, Viator, Qantas Holidays, Travelocity; we are also the only company delivering these products that has signed partnership contracts with NYC tour companies including the New York Pass, Greyline Bus Company, City Sights NY, NY Water Taxi, and NY SKYRIDE.

Uncle Sam's USA Holdings has developed a compelling branding, including a logo, website, and motto – “Go Home with a Story” – within the Travel market. The business model is scalable and transportable to major tourist destinations across the United States. We aim to establish ourselves as the “Gold Standard” for experiential, social travel across the United States. The company would use additional capital to acquire sales through attending major trade shows, staffing to continue developing new contracts, and building a sales team to turn existing contracts into significant positive cash flow in New York City to fund investment in Franchises in cities across the United States.

TravelTrac

Drop off the Grid, Stay on the Map.

TravelTrac makes sharing trip and travel adventures from any worldwide destination fun and easy. Most robust than any travel blog, TravelTrac integrates dynamic web hosting services and smart phone applications that enable the active traveller to share their travel experiences online as real time, personal, multimedia rich, travel presentations.

The online travel information space is predominantly a destination driven text review and commentary medium. TravelTrac looks to make it a personal, socially networked, multimedia rich environment.

TravelTrac “Lite” – the first Multimedia Travel App for the iPhone is currently available on iTunes. You can “Drop off the Grid, but Stay on the Map” and share travel adventures – even when cellular or wireless connections are unavailable. TravelTrac Apps provide “offline mode” functionality. Launch the App – take photos, videos, add travel journal entries, location or position reports, and once a connection is re-established launch the App again and your content uploads and dynamically generates a personal travel micro site with chronological accuracy integrating geotagged photos, slideshow features, videos, Google maps with pinpoint locations, travel route information, and weather into one interactive multimedia travelogue. Update content using a wireless connection to avoid expensive international roaming charges. Contacts added from a smart phone or imported from webmail receive automatic notifications whenever updates occur so friends can stay connected to your travel experiences.

Whether sailing the Atlantic, trekking the Himalayas or road tripping across the continent you can share your travel experiences with friends from anywhere. TravelTrac “Pro” Apps will provide comprehensive “trip” edit functionality, enhanced on device viewing features, and greater photo and video capacity. Additionally you will be able to post your trips and travel adventures directly to Twitter or Facebook right from the App. TravelTrac will support Google Android, Blackberry, and Palm OS devices in Q4 2009.

Learn more at: http://www.traveltrac.com/mobileapps.asp

Arrange Your Exchange

There are over 2.8 million Holiday Home owners in Europe. Naturally, the novelty of holidaying in the same location year after year can become repetitive and unappealing.

ArrangeYourExchange.com facilitates this community of holiday home owners to exchange amongst themselves, offering them an extensive choice of both location and accommodation. A focus on traditionally popular holiday destinations that consistently perform well - served by multiple communication routes – is a key aspect of our approach.

ArrangeYourExchange enables its client base to leverage their holiday home so that they can experience alternative holiday locations for a fraction of the cost compared with using traditional travel related services. This is done whilst maintaining the full benefits of owning a holiday home. It offers a cost effective way to travel to Europe and beyond through an extensive selection of available holiday homes (both European and global) and eliminates the ‘consumer pain’ of holidaying in the same location time and time again.

Self-Catering holiday accommodation has become very popular within the holiday industry over the past few years. Rates of holiday home ownership in the territories ArrangeYourExchange aims to target initially - France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany UK & Ireland - have increased significantly over the last ten years. Many holiday home owners already have an online presence and are open to new and innovative opportunities that will enhance their experience of holiday home ownership.

ArrangeYourExchange is currently developing an algorithm as a weighted calculation to accurately classify the potential of a property based on the holiday home’s location, availability, seasonality along with the facilities the holiday home provides. Members simply post weeks onto the site, earn credits, and exchange those credits for a fellow members’ holiday home.

A two sided business model with the aim of becoming a ‘one-stop-travel-shop’ for holiday home owners, ArrangeYourExchange will firstly create an active community of holiday home owners eager to do exchanges across a multilingual online platform before providing them full travel solutions e.g. airlines, car hire companies, airport parking services, airport lounges services, transfers services, theatre/shows and other forms of entertainment.

Learn more at: http://arrangeyourexchange.com

Tripsketch

Online travel planning has made great strides. Want a plane ticket to London? It's yours. A 3-star hotel in Edinburgh? Simple. Dinner reservation in Manchester? Bon appétit. But what about a two week trip to all three cities, staying the right number of days in each, catching (or avoiding) the Arts Festival, keeping track of meetings, deciding which attractions to see during your free time, figuring out travel between attractions and doing it all while staying within budget?

Planning a trip like this is time consuming, inefficient and cumbersome. Web solutions focus on sponsored content, ads, flight and hotel search, each in its own silo, out of context and with no notion of the primary reason for leisure travel: memorable attractions and experiences while staying within budget and minimizing disappointment.

TripSketch addresses these problems with a streamlined trip authoring application for travelers or their agents. TripSketch plans are built around actionable content so destination activities can be scheduled based on interests and logistical criteria, including opening hours, costs, travel time, and visit duration. For travelers with tight schedules -- airline passengers with a layover, cruise passengers at a port of call, anyone enjoying a quick city break -- these criteria are critical, but every traveler who wants to make the most of their time and money can benefit from the travel planner.

The TripSketch technology can be incorporated into an existing site using a private labeled instance of the TripSketch application providing a custom look-and-feel, or built into your own application using our web service interface. You can use our professionally prepared content, your own content, user generated content, or any combination. TripSketch's patent pending technology includes the TravelXML data model, the Travel Content Management System, the TripSketch network of destination experts, destination information for hundreds of cities worldwide, our AJAX based trip authoring web application, and ReST based TravelXML service.

GetYourGuide

Online Platform for Tours, Attractions and Activities

GetYourGuide is an online distribution and booking platform for tours, attractions and activities.

Based on the idea that authentic experiences are the most important thing in traveling, we set out to create a platform for finding, comparing & booking local experiences in destinations around the world. Products on GetYourGuide can range from sightseeing tours and museum day passes to shark diving or desert safaris.

GetYourGuide takes the travel segment of tours & activities into the world of modern e-commerce. Unlike any other existing solution, we offer our suppliers a distribution platform, a marketing platform and a fully-featured, multilingual administration system at the same time. Suppliers on GetYourGuide have full control over their products and we let them use their own brands to market their services. Customers can book our products on our website at www.getyourguide.com or via our distribution partners that include major online travel agencies, national tourism boards, hotel websites, online travel communities and more. GetYourGuide is the fastest growing platform of its kind.

theZouk

With theZouk, hotels and travellers meet in a whole new way

theZouk is a consumer focused marketplace (souk) offering a whole new and exciting way of finding a place to stay. Creating an alternative to the traditional online hospitality websites, theZouk focuses on the traveller’s situation and needs. No more spending hour after hour, searching the web for the right place to stay. Instead, the traveller files a personalized request for accommodation – and theZouk then starts to collect confidential offers directly from each relevant hotel or room provider.

One by one, personal offers adapted to the travellers needs start to arrive in the traveller’s inbox. It is in other words the room provider – not the client – being the active part. theZouk becomes a window into the traveller’s world, even offering the traveller the possibility to inform the room provider about special needs and ask questions about the offers they receive – an advantage that could mean the difference between a good and a perfect deal.

Because theZouk automatically notifies its room providers about potential clients – and since there are no registration or subscription fees or need for complex and expensive new technology – the database contains many room providers not found in any of the traditional online booking systems. The provider only pays for each accepted offer – and then only €8, regardless of the value of the reservation. Some of these savings are often passed on to the traveller in the form of lower rates than anywhere else – which is the whole idea behind theZouk: To create a true win-win situation.

theZouk already reaches more than 125.000 room providers in 43 countries, but since all types of accommodation can register for free, the number is constantly growing. Our database contains not only traditional hotels, apartment hotels and B&B’s, but also mansions and small castles, cottages – and even private homes. Due to its flexibility and focus on the traveller, theZouk can be used by all kinds of travellers, be it business or pleasure, travelling alone or as a family or large group – you can find a place to stay on any budget. You never know what’s out there – why not Zouk it?

YourTour

Innovative Tour Planning Technology

The innovative YourTour technology, developed by DeciZium, is a first of its kind intelligent system for online travel planning. Acting as a “Personal Travel Agent”, YourTour assists travelers in planning their trips by automatically generating complete travel itineraries in accord with their personal preferences, wishes, and limitations.

After answering a few basic questions, such as destination and travel dates, the traveler receives an initial trip proposal, including a detailed day-by-day itinerary. The trip proposal recommends area attractions, in a logical order, along with accommodations, and provides precise routing between locations using Google maps. The traveler has the option of interactively customizing the initial trip proposal by specifying more preferences (budget, activity types, specific attractions or hotels, etc.) and requesting a new trip proposal. Once the traveler is satisfied with the trip proposal, he is only a simple click away from booking it.

The YourTour decision support system is driven by a sophisticated computation engine, which exploits the power of Amazon's cloud computing servers. YourTour's mathematical algorithm takes into account hotel availability, driving time, attractions' opening days and hours, as well as other elements, to create a trip proposal that best suits the individual traveler, whether they are looking for the most economical offer, or building their dream trip. This one of a kind technology is the fruit of more than ten years of applied mathematical research.

The public website, YourTour.com, is the first commercial application of the YourTour technology. At this stage, YourTour.com enables users to plan self-guided driving tours in France, based on information from travel books publisher, Lonely Planet, and in partnership with Booking.com, Europe's largest online hotel reservations provider. Other countries will be added in the coming months, along with new features.

YourTour's technology is also being marketed as a white label solution for various travel industry professionals, so that tourism offices, tour operators, hotel chains, and other travel businesses can offer tailor-made self-drive tours to their clients through their own websites.

J2Ski

Connecting the Skier to the Mountain

J2Ski's popular, content-rich, web-sites serve millions of European and American Snow Sports Enthusiasts with all the information they need each winter.

They come to j2ski.com - again and again - for a unique and comprehensive blend of Snow Reports, Ski Resort reviews and Maps, combined with a vast range of accommodation and travel options.

J2ski.com has been the fastest growing Ski Site on the planet in recent years, and is firmly established as one of the two most popular in the UK. With expansion planned into the US, Canadian and European markets, J2Ski is fast becoming the global reference point for skiers and snowboarders.

J2Ski aspires to be :-

• The Portal of choice for the Independent Skier, providing information to attract, engage and retain the winter sports enthusiast.
• The Partner of choice for the Snow Sports Industry, providing a context within which products and services can be marketed to a targeted and qualified audience.

J2Ski is a “one stop shop” serving the needs of Snow Sports enthusiasts, whether they're looking for traditional package holidays, a personalized short break or a completely bespoke (self-serve) dynamic package. They can research resorts, book their skis and keep an eye on the snow and weather forecasts.

And if they just want to stop by for a chat, they can do that too.

AboutAnywhere.com

A Next Generation Online Travel Agency That Saves Consumer and Hotels Money

AboutAnywhere.com is disrupting the online distribution landscape by creating an Online Travel Agency that derives its profits from Pay Per Click advertising rather than commissions. This new model has been embraced by the hotel industry which has been battling increasing margins from the OTAs for the last ten years. AboutAnywhere.com has forged relationships with several major hotel chains including Best Western, La Quinta, Accor, Sol Melia, Barcelo, Iberostar, RIU, Golden Tulip and many others, and is in discussions with Starwood, Hilton and IHG.

The Company is attracting and retaining consumers through its “Back to the Basics” approach, providing personalized attentive service that goes way above and beyond the consumers' expectation of an online travel agency. AboutAnywhere.com has integrated hotel Twitter feeds into their destination content, and has used social media to generate natural traffic to the website rather than relying solely on search engines.

The Pay Per Click program puts hotels in full control of their position in the sort order within their destination, which is controlled by a dynamic bidding system just like Google Adwords. Rates and inventory can be provided through extranet, major channel management software solutions such as EZ Yield or RateTiger, or through XML Connectivity. The Company is also focusing heavily on improving administrative functionality for hotels, in order to become the ultimate hotel-friendly distribution partner.

While other OTAs are cutting airline booking fees to try and steal market share away from each other, AboutAnywhere.com has emerged with a new, more efficient model that makes each booking more profitable for hotels, and more affordable for consumers.

TouristWay

your products, your store!

TouristWay is a web application to create online reservation systems through dead-simple load/publish/sell steps. Not another affiliation program nor a new review-and-recommendation portal, because we believe itʼs time to add new products to the mix rather than keep re-mixing the usual catalogues.

Thanks to Google, collaborative tagging, social networks and lately the whole “real-time” philosophy (Twitter), the Internet is becoming a distributed platform which, soon, will no-longer require independent aggregators like travel portals. Contents and services will be searched, consumed and reviewed in marketplaces provided by the same infrastructure that characterize our daily online experience (Google, Facebook, etc.). Key for products to stand out will be quality, innovation and value rather than adwords budget.

Here enters TouristWay, to give you total control over your store and help you deliver your competitive advantage your way: publish anything that contributes to your vision and be free to cast your marketing idea without constraints. We believe in giving the power to those who either own the product or can significantly increase its value. We want operators to make meaning and for them we designed the most intuitive and customizable web application to publish their unique offer and make it available to the end customer.

TouristWay is available as hosted service or downloadable application and sports graphic themes with editable templates, comprehensive online booking capabilities, API to integrate third-party tools and syndicate feeds; all handled through a slick web-based administration interface.

Evature

Evature is developing an Expert Virtual Agent (EVA) technology utilizing cutting edge Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

EVA is a Virtual Travel Agent who understands customers' travel requests (submitted in natural language) and acts upon them (deferring to a human agent when in doubt).

EVA has the potential to significantly reduce operating expenses and increase productivity of travel agencies and travel web sites.

EVA communicates with the customer as a human travel agent would:

• Receives travel requests in Natural Language via Email, chat or SMS.
• Interacts with existing systems (GDS, CRM, etc.).
• Takes full responsibility for the task of travel planning, communicating with both the customer and the supervising agent as needed throughout the process.

EVA provides the following benefits:

• Automates a significant part of an agent's work, thus significantly reducing operating costs.
• Increases reliability and reduces costly errors.
• Improves responsiveness and reaction times, providing a 24/7 service.
• Improves personalization via machine learning, taking into account numerous parameters and preferences.

EVA will provide immediate value upon initial deployment, with increasing benefits over time as EVA learns the specific needs of the agency and each of its customers.

Aviatour

Aviatour Air's primary objective is to make the Philippines more accessible by providing safe, affordable and reliable amphibian service to key destinations. We aim to significantly shorten travel time between the country's 7,101 islands, encouraging day and overnight excursions initially from Cebu and Manila.

Aviatour intends to complement, not compete with existing commercial airline service. It will also package the Philippines as a large, natural "themed" destination with something for everyone and every budget.. We will be the transportation of choice and official guide to the most popular destinations in the country.

Currently, Aviatour is a leading general aviation service provider with operations in the Philippines and United States. The company provides flight training, charter and tour services, maintenance services, and aircraft sales. Aviatour is the number one flight school in the Philippines with students from 25 countries. It has a full-time staff of 70 employees and operates a fleet of more than 35 aircraft.

HouseTrip.com

HouseTrip.com: making holiday rentals easier.

The average holiday rental host spends hundreds of euros every year to advertise his property on classified ads websites, with no guaranteed return from his money. He has to answer questions from potential tenants on the phone and he may receive many enquiries for periods that are already booked. He also has the unpleasant task ofcollecting money himself from the guests.

The process is very difficult for guests as well: they need to call an average of 8 rentals before finding one that is suitable and available !They then need to make a risky payment to an individual host, without knowing what happens if something goes wrong.

Holiday rentals are nicer and cheaper than hotels : why then must it be so difficult to find and book them?

HouseTrip.com launched in mid-September and has already gained the confidence of hundreds of holiday rental hosts and guests.

Hosts list their property for free and then manage the whole rental process through the site : they simply sit back and watch bookings coming their way. When they accept a booking, the guest’s credit card is automatically charged and their calendar updates itself accordingly. What happens if a guest cancels his booking? Depending on the host’s chosen cancellation policy, the money is automatically distributed; the free dates can then be rented out again.

HouseTrip is also much easier for guests: they can easily find the holiday rental suiting their needs, browse reviews from pasts guests and readanswers to questions commonly asked about the property. They then securely pay through the site, knowing that they are protected by HouseTrip’s cancellation policy.

Tripatini

Mix it up with the travel experts.

Dubbed “Facebook for travelers” by the New York Post, Tripatini.com is a free social network and blog where travelers and travel experts from across the planet hang out, share and learn how to travel better and smarter. A fresh new way to interact, Tripatini breaks down the traditional barriers that have stood between travelers and travel journalists, publicists, agents, tour operators, other travel vendors, and virtually anyone with good, actionable info. In an age when travel media are fast shrinking or disappearing, Tripatini.com represents a new channel of communication between travelers and experts.

With a user-friendly interface, the online travel community combines useful content -- destination spotlights; user-generated photo and video galleries; news feeds; events calendar; world music videos; and a weekly travel blog -- with a smart, eclectic and fast-growing network of members from dozens of countries/territories on six continents. They're all travel enthusiasts, but many are also travel journalists, travel agents, tour operators, airline reps, hoteliers, and marketers.

Members participate in more than 260 groups dedicated to all 50 U.S. states and most countries around the world, as well as travel topics including eco/sustainable tourism, family travel, honeymoons/weddings, gay/lesbian, movies & travel, travel with pets, wine, foreign-language and culture clubs, history/archaeology, singles travel, and more. Most of these groups list specific members qualified to advise on that destination or topic.

Tripatini also has dedicated groups for travel media, travel agents, tour operators, and travel publicists, and a random sampling of other members includes representatives from: Colombia Tourism, Finnair, German and Austrian National Tourist Offices, South African Airways, Kimpton, Lufthansa, Air Seychelles, Mandarin Oriental, Minnesota Tourism, Mississippi Tourism, Netherlands Tourist Board, NYC & Company, Portugal Tourism, Ritz-Carlton, SAS, South Carolina Tourism, Visit Britain, and Visit Florida, among others. All are ready and willing to help fellow members upon request.

Hip Chalets

The new boutique brand for luxury winter sports holidays!

Hip Chalets is the new boutique brand for luxury winter sports holidays! Launched by ex British no.1 free-skier Jamie Strachan and his fiancé Julia Bergklint ex Swedish rock climbing champion. Their winning spirit has enabled the company to grow through a deep recession. Their passion to be flexible and different has enabled them to think out of the box showing clear differentiation from its competitors. Hip Chalets is a design driven company, yes, they are interior designers too! Renovating tired old chalets and turning them into super chalets on a shoestring, helping them to generate high margins during the week market. These designer chalets are offered to hip travellers through the operations wing of the business via a simple but stylish website. www.hipchalets.com. In just three years Hip Chalets has reached nearly half a million turn over with a respectable profit too. Thanks to the great brand name and a star studded social network, they have managed to stir up quite a buzz on the social seen. Hip Chalets are now looking to become the next big Alpine lifestyle brand!