We’re excited to announce today a next generation Travel Planner and a chance to escape to a tropical paradise!

We know that planning a trip can be an overwhelming experience and although the internet is the go-to place for all your information these days, it can be a real challenge to collect and organize your research. The new TravelMuse Planner makes the chaos of travel planning easy and fun by providing a central place to save, organize and share all your research for any destination.

So what have we changed?

•    New TravelMuse Bookmarker
•    New TravelMuse Planner
•    New Destination Guide section
•    New Ask Friends on Facebook integration
•    New TravelMuse Trip Widget
•    New Contest to Win a Trip to a Tropical Paradise!

You might ask what haven’t we changed!

1.    New TravelMuse Bookmarker
We believe that the Web is the platform for planning your trip, and although we have great content on TravelMuse, we know from industry research that people search about 22 different sites to gather research. We also know that with the existing Bookmarker, TravelMuse members have already saved over 5,000 different websites to their Trips!

The new Bookmarker now allows you to save pages, photos and text from any website into your personal Trip folder. If you include the address, we’ll plot it on an interactive map. Learn more and watch the demo video.

2.    New TravelMuse Planner
You can now view your research on an interactive map, create a schedule and find other popular items based on the research you have saved. This will make planning your trip on TravelMuse more intuitive and rewarding.

Map View
You asked for it, we built it. Being able to use maps to plan your trip came out as a top request, so we’ve built out some cool interactive maps to help plan your trips.

•    Saved items are plotted on a map.
•    The Most popular drop-down menu shows attractions, hotels, restaurants and shopping items saved by other TravelMuse members.
•    The More… drop-down menu shows photos, videos and Wikipedia entries from Google.
•    The Google search box at the bottom of the map also lets you search for items from Google Local and save these directly to your Trip.

Item View
On the “Items” view the research cards are now easier to read and expand to show more detail. We also added:
•    Sort by Most Recent, Added By, Category, Location and Schedule
•    Click on the icons on the right of the card to edit, schedule or delete.
•    Ask Friends on Facebook from an Item view (see below for details on this).
•    Click on the destinations to explore destination guides on TravelMuse or the items to see more detail.

Schedule View
Not everyone wants to plan every day of vacation, but some trips call for more organization than others, so we changed the scheduling view to be more calendar based.
•    Now on the calendar view you can open items in the right hand Trip list and select the day or date they want to add the item to.
•    On the calendar itself you can drag and drop items between days.

3.    New Collaborate and Share
You can still invite friends to join you on TravelMuse to help plan your trip. We’ve also further integrated with Facebook to develop the “Ask Friends” feature. Now for every item you can ask for specific advice. Requests are posted to your wall and then the respective comments are incorporated back into your trip.

4.   New Destinations
We reorganized the key destination landing pages which you can navigate to from the Destinations header or to a particular destination highlighted in your trip.

It’s now easier to navigate between guides, hotels, attractions, restaurants, shops and Trips. You can explore items on the map and scroll down the page to see popular Trips, Most popular attractions, themes and activities and articles.

5.    New TravelMuse Trip Widget
We  introduced the TravelMuse Trip Widget so you can share and showcase Trips on your website, blog and across your social networking sites, based on your Member ID or Trip ID.  Learn how to create your Trip Widget.

6.    New Win a Trip to a Tropical Paradise!
We’re really excited to have partnered with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau to give away a fantastic luxury trip for two to the tropical island of Oahu!. Join TravelMuse and create a Trip to any destination for a chance to win this amazing prize. Enter now!

Lastly, stay tuned for details on our “Trip of the Week” giveaway with Frommers.

We hope you enjoy taking the new site for a spin and please give us any feedback—be sure to use the new feedback tab on the right side of the page!

Phew, right time for a beer or two, I think…

Happy New Year! We hope you had a great holiday season. As soon as one vacation is over, I usually start plotting my next getaway–so what are you waiting for? It’s time to start thinking about your travel plans for 2010!

British Virgin Islands:Best Virgin Gorda resorts, restaurants and attractions. Photo courtesy of the British Virgin Islands Tourist Board.

Here are 10 New Year trip-planning resolutions for you to consider:

1. Give up your daily Starbucks, stop buying shoes you’ll only wear once or forgo another indulgence so you can take a vacation.
Use the Trip Budget Calculator to find out what you could give up!

2. Don’t go back to the same destination again! Get inspired and go see the world.
Use the Inspiration Finder to match what you like with where you should go.

3. Get organized!
Start a new Trip with the TravelMuse Planner so you can keep all your travel ideas and information in one place.

4. Save bookmarks from other travel Web sites.
Add the TravelMuse Bookmarker to your browser so you can easily save Web pages to your Tripfolio.

5. Collaborate with your co-travelers on planning the ideal Trip.
Invite friends and family to join your Trip so they can add items, comments and contribute.

6. Avoid relying on random reviews written by people you don’t know; get advice from friends you trust.
Ask Friends on Facebook for ideas and advice on where to stay, eat and play.

7. Cut through the clutter and read useful travel information.
Read articles guides and tips from local experts and seasoned travel writers. View other member’s Trips and bookmarks.

8. Easily take your travel information and notes with you.
Create and print a free custom pdf travel guide with all your travel information.

9. Have fun, save time and plan your best trips ever in 2010.
TravelMuse is here to help!

10. Let us know how we’re doing so we can make your travel-planning experience even better!
E-mail support@travelmuse.com

Today, I am delighted to announce the latest release of the TravelMuse Planner. (From the TravelMuse homepage, just type in where you want to go to try it out.) This is the most advanced yet intuitive trip planning solution on the Web and we’re really excited to share it with you! Our goals for this release were to:

1. Make the overall process of trip planning on TravelMuse even easier and more fun.
2. Make it simpler for you to find and save relevant content—both on TravelMuse and from anywhere on the Web.
3. Create a forum for TravelMuse users to share information about the Web site and the trip planning process.

Here’s a quick rundown on the key features:

A Tripfolio That Follows You Everywhere

The Tripfolio is your virtual manila folder—a central storage container for all your travel research. It’s the place where you save anything that interests you while planning your trip. You’ll notice that the Tripfolio is now bound to the right side of the site and is present when you are using the TravelMuse Planner.

Above: When you begin a trip, your Tripfolio is empty. As you save research, it appears in your Tripfolio.

Above: Tripfolio with saved research items.

New! Embedded Web Search

It’s no longer acceptable for travel Web sites to exist as walled gardens. Consumers naturally visit multiple Web sites when planning a trip, but struggle to organize all that information.

Now, with embedded Web search, users can explore the Web and save any interesting Web pages directly to their trip plan without leaving TravelMuse—no more managing multiple windows or endless bookmarking, and no more e-mailing links back and forth to your friends while planning a vacation.

It doesn’t matter what kind of page it is: A hotel review, an article, a blog post—all of them can be saved and stored centrally. Now, co-travelers can save all of their favorite research in the same place.

TravelMuse is the first travel Web site to harness the power of the Web in this way.

The screenshot below illustrates how TravelMuse has integrated embedded Web search into the trip planning experience. Note that there are two tabs at the top of the page; one tab provides access to TravelMuse’s own great content. The second tab lets you explore the Web using embedded Web search. The power of this integrated experience is that you can save both TravelMuse content with Web content to a single place—the Tripfolio.

New! Community Forums

Have a question about TravelMuse or a great idea for a new feature? On the new community forum you can connect with other TravelMuse users and communicate with the TravelMuse product team. It’s your go-to location for product help and idea exchange.
We hope you like this new release as much as we do. As always, please send us your ideas and feedback so that we can continue to improve the TravelMuse experience.

One last thing: With this release, we are also refocusing our content development around the planning process. What this means is that you’ll see fewer general articles and more bite-sized pearls of wisdom specifically designed to make your trip planning experience better. Leading our content development efforts is Jill K. Robinson, who assumes the role of Managing Editor. Over the coming months, you’ll see new content emerge on the site such as destination ratings, recommended trips and thousands of activity descriptions in hundreds of destinations.

Happy travels!
Kevin and the TravelMuse Team

We were excited to receive thousands of entries for our recent “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” contest sponsored by Kimpton Hotels. We’ve now secured all of the prizewinners and would like to extend our congratulations to you all and thank Kimpton Hotels, Eye-Fi and Peter Greenberg for providing prizes!

When I reached out to our grand prize winner, Natasha F. from Vienna, PA, she was very excited to have won a two-night stay with Kimpton Hotels and $500 spending money. She went on to tell me about the trip she had planned on TravelMuse, which I wanted to share:

“Also, wanted to add that the TravelMuse Web site is one of my favorites. It was a great resource in planning our New England Road trip. I printed out the customized travel brochure and put into a binder. It contained all our notes and reservations for our trip (which was crucial since we drove over 1500 miles and needed to be very organized for the multiple stops). TravelMuse was great in finding places I would not have known to go to without being able to search. Two destinations I completely attribute to TravelMuse are Waterfire in Providence, RI and Purgatory Chasm in MA. Additionally, having everything in one place online made it accessible to me at work and at home.

I plan on using TravelMuse for all my trips, especially road trips.”

I don’t think we could have picked a better winner if we’d tried, as Natasha fully mastered the planning tools on TravelMuse. She gladly agreed to talk to me by phone last Friday to provide more feedback on her experience.

Natasha explained that her primary motivation for taking her trip was that her husband wanted to eat lobster, and she wanted to go white-water rafting and visit Cape Cod. Apart from that, everything else was fair game.

What she liked about TravelMuse

Natasha had a lot of good things to share about planning a trip on TravelMuse:

•    Destination guide-style intros gave her some background on places.
•    Top bookmarked activities by other TravelMuse members provided helpful suggestions.
•    Articles about activities and events influenced a change in her itinerary to take in the first bonfire of the season at Waterfire.
•    TravelMuse Bookmarker made it easy to add any Web page to her trip.
•    Ability to edit and add scheduled details (e.g., bed and breakfast confirmations) kept everything in one place, making it easy to find.
•    The free custom pdf guide with all her trip information, maps and notes became her bible for her road trip.

What she thought we could improve on TravelMuse
Natasha didn’t have too many problems with TravelMuse:

•    Scheduling items became more difficult with a full Tripfolio and a packed schedule for a 10–day itinerary, as it was hard to drag and drop items far down the page. [This is a great piece of feedback and we are looking at how we can make this easier to use.]
•    A couple of great suggestions… [Sorry, I’m not going to post these gems. You’ll just have to watch this space!]

Natasha plans to use her “Plan a Trip, Win a Getaway” prize to plan a California wine country road trip.

Thanks Natasha for being a very well-deserved winner and for sharing some great user feedback with the TravelMuse team!

After several months of end-user testing, countless design cycles and many, many cases of Diet Mountain Dew and Red Bull, we are excited to bring you the totally redesigned, simpler yet more powerful, TravelMuse Planner.

The Planner still lets you organize all of your travel research into one central location, create an itinerary and involve your co-travelers in the planning process. But with this release, you also get new robust Mapping and Search Tools that enable you to quickly find and save the information you are looking for—be it articles on a given destination or specific places to sleep, eat and see. You can also now use proximity search to find nearby restaurants, hotels and attractions that are closest to a given location—and view search results plotted out on a map.

In addition, we’ve incorporate more than 2 million user ratings and reviews for hotels, restaurants and attractions from TravelMuse and other Web sites, including Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Travel and more.

Finally, we’ve introduced Customized Travel Guides. You can now create a personalized travel guide—on the fly—that is 100 percent personalized and contains all your important saved research, with maps, your schedule and a detailed city guide. You can build, share and print tailor-made travel guides to take on vacation at no charge.

This is our proudest day at TravelMuse yet. We’ve listened to our users, engaged them in the design process and released something that we think is market leading. We hope you agree.

Kevin & Eric