We noticed something funny in travel a few years ago. If you were “going to amsterdam”, there were a zillion sites that would totally rock your boat. But as it turns out, none of us is just “going to amsterdam”. You’re probably going there for the second time, or traveling with your kids, or have a conference to attend, or like vegan food or hate Vermeer.

That, is what our *typical* trip looks like. But try telling that to your favorite travel website!

Another thing that gets our goat. Somehow everyone in the travel industry tends to believe that the hard part is getting recommendations on what to see & where to stay – hence all the activity in the social / local space. But if you’re anything like me, the stressful part is actually all the stuff in between – how do I get from the airport to the hotel? Will my phone work? Can I rent a stroller in Amsterdam? Close your eyes for a moment and try to remember the last trip you were planning? Did it resemble Google -> Tripadvisor -> Forums -> Google…all while you’re noting down stuff in a spreadsheet? What does that experience remind you of?

I knew you would say filing your taxes!

Unfortunately, the travel web has been denying this reality all along, despite all the love from their users. So two years ago, we set out to make travel planning radically simple.

Source: http://www.getthebigpicture.net/

Our approach is simple – you ask any question about your trip, and one of us will do all the research & bookings for your trip! We then turbocharge this by:

1. Having tens of thousands of travel enthusiasts sign up and train to become travel researchers.

2. Building an amazing technology platform that aggregates the entire travel web and auto-categorizes it – deals, events, hotels, sublets, even tips from locals on foursquare and your friends who’ve recently been there.

We call this the 90% tech + 10% human insight approach. Which made one of our users call it

“the Robocop for travel!”

This hyper-personalization has earned us lots of love from our early users!

And now as we begin our next chapter, we’re happy to share that we’ve received investments from some notable investors who immediately shared our passion for bringing the human back in a massive category! Our investors now include Blumberg Capital, Dave McClure / 500 Startups, Lewis Cheng, Mac Harman, Sandeep Bapna, Priyavrat Bhartia, Aldo Monteforte and Alvaro Gutierrez.

Thanks for your support. You can follow along on Twitter and Facebook.

mygola was one of the presenters at Phocuswright’s Travel Innovation Summit in Fort Lauderdale a couple of weeks back. Since this was my first PCW conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

As it turned out, the attendees list was stellar and the production quality was great. Also, as it turned out, we didn’t win anything, which bummed me no end.

Here’s my presentation (sorry, no embeds possible), you be the judge

But this is not a defense of how awesome we are. Instead, I wanted to talk about a peculiar reaction that I got from almost everyone who heard about what we do. It came up on the critics’ panel, on twitter, in idle hallway chatter and even during cocktail receptions.

“How can someone who’s never been to Amsterdam give good advice for a trip there?”

On the face of it, the question makes sense. A New Yorker would instinctively know that renting a car in NYC is foolhardy, something that’ll be hard to grasp by someone who’s never been there. And then there are cultural issues – Holiday Inn might be considered upmarket in some parts of the world but unlikely it’ll be someone’s idea of a honeymoon hotel in US.

And yet, the funny thing is, we’ve never heard this question from a single one of our tens of thousands of ACTUAL users. In fact, this is what we hear from our users!

Here’s my theory why. All the “local” stuff is already on the web!

This is definitely true for the top 500 popular destinations and increasingly, inevitably, so for others. When our guides research, they’re sifting through traditional sites like NYTimes but also local blogs like spottedbylocals, dailycandy and legions of others. In a way, they are digging up local stuff, just that it’s coming via a trusted source like the ones above. I’ve lived in NYC for 4yrs but I’m constantly surprised by the stuff the guides dig up for that city. A few times we get it wrong but you’ll be surprised how unusual that is.

What we’re doing to localize mygola

Turns out, we’ve been thinking of this problem for a bit now. There are a bunch of things already on the site, and more coming down the pike!

• We automatically fetch recommendations from amazing local / city websites for our guides to choose from
• We’ll find people who’ve recently checked into some of our recommendations (say a nightclub) and reach out to them for tips. Again, you’ll be surprised how many people like to be acknowledged for what they know about their city
• Soon, a way to let you speak to a local in any city you’re traveling to, all privately & safely.

At mygola, we have strong opinions on how broken travel planning is & what’s needed to fix it. Long way to go, so stick around and let us know how to improve!

At mygola, we’ve struggled with how to use social media smartly. Why does it matter how many followers you have on twitter or fans on Facebook? I can see why a business would like a gazillion followers (spam ‘em!) but what’s in it for your follower & your fan? And if that dynamic is not true, what’s the point?

Since we like to think things through first principle, we picked Twitter & tried a bunch of things. Here’s what worked for us, ymmv.

So what’s Twitter good for?

One-on-one communication. NOT broadcast.

Twitter may sound, smell & walk like a broadcast medium. And maybe it is. For Coca-Cola. But for a startup, it just ain’t that duck. Why spend that extra minute crafting the right tweet for an unknown audience with questionable attention when you can bang out few more lines of code?

For medium-sized / well-hyped companies, Twitter may serve as a better tool for customer service (another example of one-to-one communication). But for the starving startup, there’s only one hard fact that should convince them to invest the time – it gets them new customers.

Why should customer acquisition work well on Twitter?

Here’s my theory: the majority of people of twitter follow less than a dozen people. An @mention gets their attention, perhaps the way an email would have in, umm, 1993. If you abuse this attention, you go to spam hell. But if you are relevant, you’re golden. And what’s more relevant than responding to a call for help?

As it turns out, twitter users are asking for help every minute, every second.

Now imagine you’re one of the folks in the image above. If you have just a few dozen followers, and a feed that’s always moving, guess what happens? Your request for help echoes emptily in the twitterverse before dying a quick death, hashtag notwithstanding. That’s what we realized early on when we saw a huge number of people asking for suggestions for trips they were taking – restaurants, things to do, hotels etc. We started responding to them (always manually, see spam hell above) and were happily surprised to see how big the uptake was. The tweeters loved the convenience & direct connection, and happily retweeted their love for us after seeing how high-quality our answers were. See all the love we get here!

In fact, it worked so well that we now acquire almost half of our users through twitter. Yes, half.

I agree that Twitter is not a massively scalable channel (yet). But for comparison sakes, cost of acquisition in travel can range anywhere from $5-50, so this is a solid return on the effort (in addition to the benefit of getting the word out there about your startup). Obviously, we’re not the first ones to realize this. I’ve lately seen Inboxq & another hotel-focused tool come up that offer this as a service to anyone.

Tips on how to make Twitter customer acquisition work for you

• Don’t automate. Rather, automate only the discovery part, not the actual tweet & responses
• Don’t try to push the conversation to your website. Twitter is the natural place for it, so keep it there as long as it makes sense
• Eventually, write your own tool. We discovered a bunch of thumb rules that worked for us – ignore any user who has a link in their tweet (they’re companies, not people!); use follower / follows / tweet numbers in combination with what they say in their bios to rank influence & so on. Since Twitter search sucks only a little less than LinkedIn’s, we wrote our own tool to accommodate these.
• Ask to be retweeted. Remember, ask & ye shall be given

Let me know in comments if you have some pro tips for us. In fact, we struggle mightily with what’s the authentic thing to do on facebook, so please share your awesome ideas on what worked for you.