Creating travel planning software may well be a bad idea, but I find the reason he gives is really weak. It boils down to:
People in America don't plan travel often enough.
If that was the reason, then almost any travel startup is non-worthy. This is definitely a problem, but it's more to do with the difficulty of ranking a travel planning site in Google which is where people who don't travel often usually begin their planning. This is why SEO is so critical to any travel website.
It also conveniently ignores the rest of the world as a market. People outside the US do in fact travel far more often and more elaborately and ignoring them in the equation just boggles my mind.
My experience from this is that people do have very different expectations of how a travel planning tool should work. So the earlier comment that it faces the same challenges as to-do apps, etc.. rings very true to me.
People in America don't plan travel often enough.
If that was the reason, then almost any travel startup is non-worthy. This is definitely a problem, but it's more to do with the difficulty of ranking a travel planning site in Google which is where people who don't travel often usually begin their planning. This is why SEO is so critical to any travel website.
It also conveniently ignores the rest of the world as a market. People outside the US do in fact travel far more often and more elaborately and ignoring them in the equation just boggles my mind.
Disclosure: I'm also one of these people who acted on this bad idea of creating a travel planner: http://www.travellerspoint.com/planner/
My experience from this is that people do have very different expectations of how a travel planning tool should work. So the earlier comment that it faces the same challenges as to-do apps, etc.. rings very true to me.