Travel Startup Creates Network Of Travelers And Travel Vendors

Traveling broadens the mind, but the hassles of tracking down agents and hunting deals can be enough to burn travelers out before they even leave. One startup wants to change all that.

Montreal-based startup Unmapped announced Monday (Oct. 19) that it had officially launched to bring all the disparate parts of the travel industry together in a much more seamless experience. CEO Lisa Israelovitch explained that Unmapped’s “collaborative itinerary and experience solution” could finally give travelers a measure of accessibility that has been difficult to find in the travel industry.

“The travel industry continues to develop fragmented applications that deliver a subset of what travelers want and need,” Israelovitch said in a statement. “As travel companies interact with their customers using a variety of channels, they are putting the onus on customers to organize their travel details and search for the relevant information they may have read months ago or is buried in their inbox. Current itinerary tools only enable travelers to consolidate bookings. The Umapped platform connects travelers to their friends and social networks while enabling travel brands to proactively create relationships with their customers.”

Unmapped is launching in an industry that is experiencing its own degree of internal upheaval. According to the U.S. Travel Association, in 2012, 5 percent of eventual travelers used social networks to cull together details on transportation and itineraries, while 10 percent perused destination sites and 9 percent researched through traveler providers’ sites.

If Unmapped can provide prospective travelers with a unified approach to pre-trip research as well as social networking tools while on the go, it might not be hard to convince users that there’s a better way to travel than sifting through piles of brochures and folders of bookmarked sites.

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