TravelTekker’s Gear and Gift Guide
Even if you are a traveler who “has everything,” you will want to look over our Travel Gear and Gift guide. There are always new products coming out that can improve the travel experience.
Review: Is Mygola The First Big-data Trip Planning Site?
Introduction My first impression of Mygola was that it was yet another trip planning site, albeit more attractive and better-executed than most. In addition to the Mygola.com website, Mygola has an iPad app that is functionally identical to the site. One of the chief attractions of the site and app is the large number of…
GetGoing Review • Travel Essentials • Google not Helping Hotels • China Travel Compilation • 124 Travel Briefs • Travel Aspirations
GetGoing Mini Review: an Interesting Variation on Opaque Booking Priceline and Hotwire have proved that airlines and hotels are willing to provide deep discounts on unsold inventory through “opaque” distribution channels. The idea is that the shopper purchases the product based on a generic description and the actual brand and product are revealed only after…
Peek.com Mini-Review • Hotels & OTAs: Better Together • Travel Health Benefits? • 134 Travel Briefs • Travel Aspirations
Mini Review: Peek Destination Activity Booking Site Peek, a destination activities guide and booking site which launched late last year, is backed by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey. Schmidt and Dorsey know a good thing when they see it. There are other sites and apps that do destination activity…
CUPED’s Arrow for Analytics Nerds: More Sensitivity For Online Experiments
A group of online experimenters at Microsoft has just written a new paper that has the potential to increase the value that A/B and multivariate tests can bring to online businesses. They have documented methods to combine pre-experiment data with experiment data to yield increased sensitivity for testing the performance of new designs and features. They…
Review: EuroCheapo Hotel Search & Booking
2012-09-20 Update: We shared this review with the folks at EuroCheapo via Twitter and they replied: Excellent recap. You know what you’re talking about & touched on nearly every design/feature debate we’ve had the past 4 months. New York-based EuroCheapo, which has been around since 2001, just relaunched its hotel search and booking site. Interaction designer…
Review: Mapov Hotel Search
Startup Mapov combines hotel deals and TripAdvisor review data to inform a novel map-based hotel search. My colleague Troy (an interaction designer) and I looked at the site. We tried our usual Paris hotel search scenario since the number and density of hotels in Paris makes for a good design and performance stress test. Pros:…
Utrip Mini-Review • Kayak IPO • Priceline v. Expedia • The Shard • and more…
Contents Utrip Mini-Review • Kayak IPO On • Priceline v. Expedia Semi-opaque booking • How to Pay Abroad • The Shard Mini-Review: Startup Utrip Aims to Simplify Trip Planning Seattle-based trip planning site Utrip offers an interesting user experience design. Users first choose a destination city and travel dates. They then set their preferences for…
Review: Online Experiments Done Right
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: Five Puzzling Outcomes Explained by Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng, Brian Frasca, Roger Longbotham, Toby Walker and Ya Xu. There are a lot of people doing online A/B and multivariate testing these days, but few of them bring as much analytic rigor to the process as Ronny Kohavi and his colleagues. Ronny…
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