Travelling comes at a price. But exactly what price? A travel start-up dedicated to gathering, organising and analysing travellers' costs - data inputted by users - is calculating the answer! By combining features and tools of today's best social web networks cost4travel invents a way to make cost management and travel budgeting easy, interactive and attractive.
The launch of a new start-up, cost4travel, aims to provide the missing link in today's busy travel-planning web arena. By generating travel expense reports that allow travellers to budget carefully and spend wisely, cost4travel exposes 'the true cost of travel' - something missing from current travel sites. Travellers input costs for trips across a range of travel services from planes, trains and automobiles to hotels, ski hire and scuba dive. This feeds the site's database for travellers to reference, compare, contrast and ultimately be in control of actual and future travel costs.
The technology will store, organise and compute the pricing data inputted. The future search feature will, using a number of parameters and business rules, show average, or highest or lowest price for particular travel services. The information you want will be generated in currencies of your choice, and offer bar charts and graphs for clear reference to help you budget. You will be able to view cost history, i.e. the evolution of a service's average price during the previous 12 months.
Currently in beta version, the site acts as a hub for travel costs - allowing you to record, reference and manage your own costs online, in one place, and always to stay on top of travel spend. As more and more individuals feed trip data, the value of the site grows; the site's 'community' value kicks-in when any traveller can reference all costs from others, searching for the lowest, highest and average prices for selected travel products, destinations and dates.
Unique to cost4travel is that it relies exclusively on traveller-generated content and that, in turn, is about actual spend, the reality on the ground - and not the costs posted by the providers themselves, that get packaged, fluctuate and are not so transparent for consumers. The business model focuses on this transparency of cost. Co-founder and owner Stephane Pingaud says, "...by becoming the reference-site for what the real costs of business or leisure trips are, then it is this data - the reality of pricing and the consequence of traveller-trends made apparent in this web site that will prove valuable to the travel and transportation industry." In turn, therefore, cost4travel may prove beneficial in influencing suppliers' prices - hopefully to the benefit of all.
Note to the editor
cost4travel is a new web start-up currently based in Madrid, Spain. The start-up has designed, developed and launched a new travel site (www.cost4travel.com) exclusively dedicated to recording and referencing the prices that travellers have paid for their flights, accommodation, transportation, restaurants and other relevant travel-related expenses.
cost4travel enable travellers to upload and manage their travel costs online and help other travellers to search for user-validated cost information to budget their trips and/or establish and negotiate fair prices for their travel services of their choice.
