Trafflers stands out in tough travel space by giving smart suggestions

There are so many online travel startups around that it’s sometimes hard to differentiate them from one another.

The latest to enter this space is Trafflers, which is founded by a group of Dutch geeks: Koh San Ngai, Kenneth Touw, Gherry Harahap, and Giovanni Martina. Trafflers is essentially an online group travel planner that aims to make the process more fun and intelligent. They are currently incubatees at the JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp.

The secret sauce that sets them apart from other startups like Hipmunk and Wanderfly is the end result of the founders’ Natural Language Processing backgrounds. Essentially, Trafflers can analyze the interactions between travel buddies who are using the app and then make recommendations based on the conversations and behavior.

Within Trafflers, individuals can plan details like flights, hotels, and travel destinations. All members of the group can suggest places they’d like to go, and Trafflers will then score each destination based on how they fit the group as a whole. This is done by analyzing each member’s interactions.

“A similar thing happens when you visit a physical travel agency. The travel agent sizes you up within ten seconds and gives you a recommendation based on your appearance,” says Koh San Ngai.

The co-founders bill Trafflers as a more complete solution than other travel startups. While Wanderfly, Hipmunk, and Kayak have been popular in the US, they only solve one particular aspect of travel planning, and not the entire process. Trafflers hopes to cover more ground.

Trafflers is also an attempt to make travel planning more fun and joyful with an attractive and simple interface that doesn’t have a steep learning curve.

After setting up a trip on Trafflers, friends will be able to see live updates of the planning in process, message one another on the platform, and receive recommendations on plane tickets based on their current location. When booking hotels and flights, they will be redirected to a partner site to do the reservation.

For now, users can only plan a series of cities they want to visit and not actual destinations within cities, which make the site more ideal for backpackers.

“We designed the site for ourselves,” says Kenneth.

The site has launched quietly for a while now with very little marketing, and is now seeing 100 users a day, Koh tells me.

Having browsed the site myself, I find that it could use more polish. For instance, whenever I update my itinerary, I fail to see the changes in my travel planner, unless I refresh the page. Sometimes, the “explore now” and “view your plan” buttons don’t show up, which means I can’t add new destinations or look at the overall plan. The site needs to be a little more responsive.

But these are early days for Trafflers yet, and I’m sure many more improvements are on the way.