Globalista launched its online information service earlier this year, providing carefully edited destination information for the luxury travel market. As well as paid-for content, Globalista’s Travel Journal blog features a mix of travel news and mini-guides.

We asked founder Olivia Koerfer about the launch and future plans for Globalista.

What motivated you to set up Globalista?

About 4 years ago I was living in Barcelona and I set up a small travel consultancy business, catering to the up-market client. There was plenty on offer in Barcelona for the package tourist, hen and stag night crowd, but little for the more discerning traveller. Together with a Catalan partner, we specialized in providing insider access. We would organize for clients to visit private homes of historical importance, museums after closing hours with curators and, of course, we would recommend the best hotels and the restaurants of the moment. John Gordon, my current business partner, was a client of mine and we began talking about how great it would be to have all this insider information accessible on the web, not just for Barcelona, but for a whole range of destinations.

How long did it take you to get from initial idea to launch?

It took about 2 years for the initial idea to get off the ground. Then a year of full time work to get to launch, so about 3 years total.

How did you perceive the initial reactions to the website when you launched?

Initial reaction has been great. We have produced some really fantastic content and our users are full of praise which is very encouraging.

What would you identify as the greatest challenges so far, and were these challenges you expected?

People expect online content to be free, so having a subscription based website has been difficult. Being a new brand it has been very hard to build up trust. Users come to our site and cannot really view much content unless they subscribe so getting past that barrier has been and continues to be a real challenge. We are trying to change that with our blog, that offers a lot of varied content accessible to all.

If you launched today, is there anything you would do differently?

Yes definitely! I think we relied too much on individual subscribers and did not investigate any other revenue streams. So we never really thought of incorporating booking engines, or licensing content. I also would have allocated a much larger budget to marketing!

There have been quite a few travel planning websites launched this year, why do you think that is?

I think people are seeing the potential of the web as not only a source of information but also a travel planning tool. It enables users to combine many things – calendar, destination info, flight info – all in one space.

How do you perceive Globalista as different from these other sources of travel information?

The fundamental problem with all user generated content travel sites is that it is very difficult to verify who the content is coming from. Even if you can get past this problem how do you know that that person’s taste is similar to your and therefore is relevant to you? That goes for other purely editorial travel information sites too. It is the relevance of the content that we are tackling. By targeting a a very specific niche, we are more confident that we can deliver relevant information. Websites that try and cover all sorts of information for all sorts of people are never going to produce quality because users can never be sure that the information is relevant to them. There is too much information out there, we sift through it all and only bring relevant information to our targeted audience. This information is also constantly cross checked and updated. Hence the subscription fee – we can guarantee relevance and therefore quality

What is your view of the current state of travel media?

The state of the travel media is very healthy as you can see from the weekly travel press round-up that appears on our blog! The online travel sphere has also booming, with new sites appearing on a weekly basis, all aiming to fill a different need.

Which travel writers do you admire?

Dervla Murphy
Rory Stewart
Bill Bryson

How would you like to see Globalista developing in the future?

Our plan is very much for Globalista.co.uk to incorporate a bookings service in the near future, improving the simplicity of our service to clients. The idea would be that clients could come to Globalista for all their travel needs. On this point, we already have an exclusive travel concierge service, Ask Globalista, which we are currently working to develop.

We would like to enhance the User Generated Content side of things on the Globalista website – this will include tips and feedback (we already receive quite lot of feedback from our users which encorporate directly into the reports) and a user to user forum is something that we are certainly looking to develop. This could also include member forums where people post details/information on private villa rentals etc.

I think an important USP for Globalista is also the breadth of content that we supply (200 travel reports online now, and counting) and it will continue to be important that Globalista produces quality content for as many destinations across the globe that is humanely possible – we would aim to have 500 travel reports and upwards at some point in the not too distant future.

nextstop.com is a new site where users offer up ideas for interesting places and activities via short, positive recommendations linking to maps and photos. More travel oriented and user-friendly than Yelp, nextstop allows users to create their own guides and link to maps showing their travels.

Carl Sjogreen is a co-founder of nextstop.com. Before founding nextstop Carl was a Group Product Manager at Google where he started Google Calendar.

What inspired you to set up nextstop?

nextstop really grew out of our own experiences traveling, and our frustration over how hard it was to find interesting and authentic things to do somewhere new.  While a lot of travel information is available online, it’s spread across many different websites and forums, hard to find, and simply overwhelming — not to mention overly focused on pushing the “top 10″ hotels or tourist traps. We saw an opportunity to make it easy and fun to find great experiences through short, positive recommendations — the kind you’d get from a local friend who could give a few tips on the best places to try.

It’s very quick any easy to add a review on nextstop. Was this one of your main aims from the outset?

Absolutely. We started with this idea that the kind of tips you’d get from a local friend often lead to the best experiences when travelling, and usually that exchange takes place in email. I ask a friend about what to do somewhere they know well, and then send back a simple list of places with a few words about each spot.We wanted to make it as easy to contribute to nextstop as sending an email like that, but much richer for the recipient (and everyone else) — with a map, photo, other people’s comments, etc.   Our short format we find is also very helpful in encouraging people to share recommendations — you don’t have to write an essay to contribute something useful.

It’s interesting you limit your reviews to 160 characters? Why this figure? Would 140 not have led to possible links into Twitter?

We definitely took inspiration from twitter’s brevity, but felt like a lot of recommendations needed just a bit more space.  We tried to find the sweet spot of size that encourages people to get to the point quickly, but leaves room for important details.  160 characters just felt right.

You only allow positive reviews, why is this?

One of our key goals is to help you discover something you’d really enjoy when you don’t even really know what you’re looking for.  Part of doing that is making it easy and fun to browse through lots of different options to try to figure out what “sticks” for you.  We felt that keeping recommendations short and positive maximizes your opportunity to find something that inspires you, and means you don’t have to wade through a bunch of places that people are just complaining about to find the thing that really excites you.

You already seem to have a good global spread (lots of UK users!). Are you surprised by how quickly word has spread?

We’re really pleased with where we are given that we just officially launched 3 weeks ago, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us if we’re really going to accomplish our objectives of helping people find a great experience anywhere on the globe.  We’re pleased that we’ve found some members really excited about what we’re trying to do, and have gone on to make hundreds of recommendations each.  We have “Top Nextstoppers” from the UK, Australia, Spain, Argentina, Taiwan and the US.

Are there any other travel startups you like?

It’s less of a travel company per se, but I think 360cities is pretty interesting, and a fascinating way to get a more in depth view of a place.

What are your plans for how nextstop will develop?

Right now our focus is on building the core of our community and expanding our content base, but there are some obvious next steps for us.  We’re really excited about making our content more accessible via mobile devices, and really enriching the content we have about places that people have recommended.

You can follow Carl and nextstop on Twitter.

Faisal Galaria was MD of Kayak Europe from 2008-9; having previously worked with several successful non-travel startups including Skype and Jaman. We decided to ask Faisal what he made of his time in the travel industry.

How did you enjoy your time in travel?

It was an intense experience rolling out in 9 new countries and I enjoyed it a great deal. There are a lot of very experienced and smart people in the industry building innovative propositions and that particularly appealed to the part of me that is curious. Most importantly we built a capable and dynamic team based out of London and built Kayak into the #2 travel search site in the UK. Number 1 would have been better but nonetheless that’s been very satisfying.

It’s a pretty diverse sector and you certainly got involved, what did you make of it?

We were focussed on the flights, hotels and car hire search space. However in many ways I think the most exciting developments we’ll see are in mobile and semantic search. In addition there is work to be done on bringing dynamic packaging and charter flight searches into the meta/comparison space.

Travel search is very competitive; with fly.com coming in can you see everyone surviving?

They are not the only ones! Across Europe there are already well established national champions like easyvoyage in France and Momondo in Denmark. The advent of increased competition from well funded new entrants like fly.com, Bing and Tripadvisor will make it harder for smaller sites to build a brand and attract + retain users. Some of them may well disappear or become absorbed into larger players looking to rapidly expand.

How crucial is the level of investment required to the success of search sites?

The bar has already been set high in the travel search space -  building a differentiated search product and then marketing it effectively is going to require significant investment. Take for example the $1.8 million Travelzoo spent to acquire the fly.com domain name. With the right team and technology though it can be done and there are a number of very compelling early stage companies in Europe. That’s really exciting.

What do you think of Bing and its implications for travel?

I like the design and interface – but then I would because it looks a lot like Kayak. However they haven’t yet brought it to Europe and Bing has yet to capture any significant market share of the search space. It’s a shame they didn’t bring out any new features or compelling product improvements to really disrupt the OTA and search space.

There seems to be no love lost between TripAdvisor and TravelPost, do you think TravelPost can genuinely challenge TripAdvisor?

TripAdvisor is huge and do a fantastic job of aggregating user generated reviews. In Europe Marc Charron manages a formidable and likeable team.

You have worked with lots of startups, are there any new travel startups which particularly impressed you?

We’re seeing some great innovative companies gaining traction in Europe. The successful ones will need great teams in addition to great technology. Zoombu, a point to point search site, founded by an ex-colleague and Trustyou a German based semantic hotel search company come to mind.

What now, and would you ever come back into travel?

I’m actively involved as an non-exec director and have interests in a couple of interesting start ups so I haven’t really left.

Travellr.com was launched in May 2009 by Ian Cumming and Scott Woodhouse. The site lets you ask questions about anywhere in the world, and connects you with a world-wide community of travellers to help people find the best local knowledge possible. I asked Ian about how Travellr has progressed since its launch.

What motivated you to set up Travellr?

We really wanted to solve a really common travel problem – if you don’t know a local, who can you ask? What if you could just ask your own travel questions, and get answers from fellow travellers and locals?

Some of the best experiences I’ve had travelling have been from asking locals and discovering cool and interesting places that are off the beaten path. Through local knowledge I’ve found underground markets in Bangkok, discovered hidden rooftop bars in New York, been snow drift racing in Niseko in Japan, explored remote Buddhist caves in Laos, and swam with reef sharks on an island in Thailand – none of which are in any guide books!

How long did it take you to get from initial idea to launch?

We developed a very early prototype of Travellr in January 2008, then raised some private investment and put our team together to develop Travellr’s architecture and features. We launched an invite-only private beta in February 2009, and continued to improve and release features to a small beta community. In May we launched Travellr at CeBIT Webciety in Sydney, Australia.

How did you perceive the initial reactions to the website when you launched?

We had a great opportunity at CeBIT to see people interact and ask questions on Travellr at our booth. You can learn a great deal about how people understand and use your site from first-hand observation. I think people understood and appreciated our simplicity and focus on only providing travel answers. Some people asked some really hard questions (such as, where to buy a 2nd hand 4wd in Kenya), and the real reward for us was seeing Travellr answer people’s questions!

What would you identify as the greatest challenges so far, and were these challenges you expected?

I feel that the biggest challenge to any online startup is distribution. The larger we can grow our network the bigger we can build Travellr’s collective knowledge, and provide more answers to questions. Our real challenge is how to grow our network and keep its quality, that is – people who love to travel and share their experiences and local-knowledge.

If you launched today, is there anything you would do differently?

It’s hard to say, since launching a site requires so much effort and attention that you can’t do everything you would like. I think finding a partner to launch with would have helped build greater distribution and awareness of our service.

Which other travel social networks do you like?

I’m a fan of SpottedByLocals (spottedbylocals.com), World Nomads (journals.worldnomads.com), Aardvark (vark.com) and Mobissimo (mobissimo.com). They all provide different kinds of social services for travelers, but they are sites that I like and are helpful for travelers.

What is your target for members?

Our target is that people get timely and relevant answers to their questions. We want to reach 95% of questions being answered within 10 minutes of being asked. We’re currently close to 95% questions answered, but need to grow our community to get closer to 10 minutes response time.

Have you found it harder or easier than expected to get new members?

We are continually observing and learning about our community. Travellr is transitioning from a beta-community to a public community, so there’s a different kinds of members. In our private-beta, we had early adopters who are great at providing feedback and support. Now that we’re public, we need to reach a broader community of travelers and demonstrate how Travellr can help them.

How would you like to see Travellr developing in the future?

We are going to continue to enhance our recommendation engine so we can improve the quality and relevance of our question suggestions. We are also planning to open up our API so other travel sites can syndicate our content and connect into our answers service. I think it will be exciting to see other great ideas and mashups people might come up with on top of the Travellr API.

You can follow Ian on Twitter at twitter.com/aussie_ian