Launch of JoGuru, a new travel social venture based on web 3.0

>JoGuru.com a new travel social network went live today. It is worth a mention as it is not an ordinary social network where you can simply meet people and make friends. This is a social network which focuses on making travelers online research about their destination quick and easy and travel planning more fun. It allows you to find seek and organize all your travel information at one place.

Praveen Kumar, CEO, JoGuru.com says “People spend hours on search engines to search for relevant travel information. An average user goes through atleast 6-8 websites to find information about their travel destinations. To add to this laborious process, they try to find out more personalized information about their destinations from friends, colleagues and travel agents. This is where we actually had the idea for JoGuru. How cool would it be if someone who knows more about my destination helps me search the internet and plan for my trip? In return, I would like to help others plan their trips by helping them search destinations that I know about. This is what we at JoGuru call... collaborative search and planning.”

Travelers today are searching multiple sites for destinations, hotels, airlines, attractions, reviews and social media sites to amass sufficient information to feel comfortable making a decision. Travelers today are demanding rich content. A considerable amount of travel-related content is maintained across a highly unorganized and non-standardized network of internet sites. As a result, locating relevant information can be a huge challenge.

A Google/Comscore click-stream study found that the online travel research process on average began 4 to 7 weeks prior to making a travel booking and involved an average of 8 searches. This is really time consuming.

Praveen further adds, “Travel research needs to become more context-based. The same individual can easily have half dozen different travel contexts. For example, travel for a family vacation, business trip, and weekend escape with a spouse, or simple a hitch hiking trip, may all be researched and booked by the same individual. Each type of trip however, could involve completely different objectives and decision processes. Unfortunately, none of the search engines try to understand the context of the search before throwing millions of search results. JoGuru is going to change this.”

Following are the Key features of JoGuru: Collaborative search platform on top of your favorite search engines, Social trip planner, Ask an Expert forum, City Pages and Addas - the local hangout places. Pretty soon, JoGuru would be launching travel social games.