About Travature

We’ve all been to travel sites that supposedly search for the lowest fares to find us the best deals. If your experience has been anything like mine, you’ve noticed that these so called deals are nothing of the sort, and that some of the user-generated content around the hotels and surrounding attractions are lacking. This is where Travature comes into the travel mix. Travature aims to be the resource of choice for consumers who are just starting their travel search process — the “where should I go?” stage. If you’re open to the destination, serious about finding the best deals, and interested in the most relevant information on potential destinations, then Travature is the site for you.

The Travature site describes itself as…

A mashup of the words travel and adventure. A mentality that says: Spin a globe… put your finger down… wonder what’s there. It may seem a little cliché, but we think the world is worth exploring. Have fun and start looking at your options, you may be going on a business trip, a quick weekend rendezvous, or you may be embarking on the journey of your life, but either way we’re here to help.

As a Travature user, I get the most benefit by conducting an open-ended search from my current location (SAN). The results displayed will give me the best flight deals (to include hotel and car deals fairly soon) to a number of different destinations, at which point I can filter by tags which include “beaches” and “surfing,” and see what other site users are saying about the various locales. Members can also contribute and reference content in the localized Travel Guides (wikis) around history, city attractions, weather, shopping and transportation.

When I sat down with Jeremy Almond and Chris Hendricks, Co-Founders of Travature, we talked about the vision, core audience, getting site users engaged in the content creation process, widgets, and monetization. Travature, currently in beta, is trying to serve young student travelers who are adventurous and budget savvy, as well as Baby Boomers ready to explore the world. Almond and Hendricks aren’t too worried about getting users engaged enough to submit content to the travel wikis; they’ve both traveled extensively and they’ve used their knowledge as a starting point and hope to inspire other passionate travelers to contribute their knowledge as well. They also have 3 different applications to pull in content from outside of Travature — a application, a application, and a application (all of the links are for MySpace apps).

Travature Quick Stats

  • 25/26 – the respective ages of Co-Founders Chris Hendricks and Jeremy Almond
  • 4 – the number of Travature full-time staff members
  • 2 – 3 weeks away from Hotel, Car, and Flight meta search
  • 8,000 registered site users with zero $$ spent on promotion
  • 0 transactions – Travature is a travel resource, but not a place to purchase travel

To Watch or Not

If the site is really going to take off, they’ll have to make it a little more user friendly. When I was playing with the site, I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of profile tabs and fields; I did enjoy that one of the profile fields was my astrological sign — I’m a Gemini and I think the world should know it. I could also barely read the sub-navigation menu items. Of course these issues are minor and should be relatively easy to fix, but unless current users become immediately engaged in the content, I could see them getting frustrated and moving on.

On the financial side, however, Travature has been entirely self-funded for the past 18 months, and they’re starting to get serious interest from Venture Capitalists in Los Angeles. Given the VC interest and the vision, I don’t see this site disappearing anytime soon. When I asked Almond and Hendricks about site monetization strategies and revenue streams, I learned that they have a very clear idea of how to make Travature profitable. Currently there are two revenue models on the table. The first and immediate method is through search leads with hotel and airline partners; they already have over 50 major travel partners. The more lucrative and long-term strategy, however, is to focus on the benefits of local search. Essentially, Travature will be able to promote and sell a clients’ travel packages to highly targeted consumers looking for travel deals.