I haven’t been around for awhile. While I haven’t been traveling a whole bunch, I have been using Priceline as usual when I’ve needed to. I came by to post some bids and was happy to see that a lot of people are still using Travelgoop. If you have any suggestions, feel free to post here or drop me a line at marc at travelgoop dot com.
I spent some time cleaning up a lot of the code. It should also be a little quicker and more stable. That being said, there are likely still a lot of bugs that haven’t been worked out given the upgrade. If you find something, please let me know. Hopefully, everyone will enjoy the new look.
So, it’s been awhile since I last posted. I really haven’t spent any time on Travelgoop recently because of lack of time. More and more people are visiting, so that’s always a good sign.
Today, I finally got around to implementing some changes. Most notably, I have added a discussion forum for each city. This will allow users to interact with one another and get help with their hotel purchases. It is pretty rudimentary at this point, but hopefully I will be able to expand on it when I have some more time. Hopefully, all you Travelgoopers will be able to share information more freely with eachother through this format. As always, if you have any feedback/suggestions, let me know!
Until next time!
Hello everyone,
I have not had a chance to work on Travelgoop much recently. I have been extremely busy pursuing my non-hobby pursuits. For the most part, this consists of working at a new job researching the many unknowns of the human brain. Very interesting stuff and quite far removed from travel bidding. That being said, I like to think that I created a vehicle that can run pretty well and hoped users would utilize it to its fullest while I was away. I remain convinced (as I’ve mentioned in earlier blog postings) that the forum system for posting travel bids is a severely flawed way to deliver this information. I started travelgoop because I love and believe in the travel bidding processes that Priceline and Hotwire have made available. After staying in a 4* hotel for $40, you too will understand the inexplicable joy that is ‘get more, pay less’… that coupled with traveling make for great experiences. I am impressed with the growing number of ‘travelgoopers’ (as coined by jgibson7 over at FlyerTalk) and the amount of feedback and comments I have received.
So, funny story… I went out of town for the weekend. Upon returning, I decided to check my Travelgoop email which I hadn’t checked for a healthy amount of time. What do I have? A letter from John W. Forehand of Lewis, Longman & Walker, P.A.. I’m not going to get too into it, but essentially I have been accused of hosting copyrighted information on Travelgoop that in fact allegedly belongs to betterbidding.com .
Ok. This is a little bit of a sidetrack, but this is not the first time Mr. Forehand of Lewis, Longman & Walker, P.A. has contacted me on behalf of betterbidding.com . I had the pleasure of hearing from him about 2 months ago. The issue then was that I was using ‘betterbidding’ as a keyword for Google AdWords. Mr. Forehand informed me that I was violating the law by using ‘betterbidding’ as a keyword because it is trademarked. This first exposed me to the confrontational mentality of the betterbidding administrators. I was generating so little traffic from this keyword that I removed it even though this isn’t settled law at all. If you want more information on this topic, you can look up the current court case that Google is in against American Blind and Wallpaper Factory (ABWF)… here is a sample article for those interested. To give you some perspective, I spent $2.50 on this campaign. For this, betterbidding.com ’s lawyer contacted me.
Back to now… I have removed the content that betterbidding.com claims is their copyright. Not because I believe one can copyright a price for a hotel for a certain night. Not because they claim that information at Travelgoop is damaging their site because users will stop posting for “fear” of having the information disseminated on other sites (people posting in a public venue for completely altruistic reasons “fear” a number and date being shown somewhere else?). I removed it because I am not doing this for a living. I haven’t run a single ad or brought in a single penny from Travelgoop. I scrape by for now, but it’s not the money that interests me. I wanted to practice my hobby of computer programming while helping people save money. So I developed an improvement to something I thought was flawed. I really truly believe in the generosity of people and I am always impressed by the support of my members and the fact that people do take the time to post information… only because they want to help others.
The real issue I have going forward is with betterbidding.com . Merriam-Webster defines a bully as “one habitually cruel to others who are weaker”. I plan to expose the betterbidding.com administrators for what they are… bullies. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in laws and intellectual property is crucial to our society. But, I never received a single email from an administrator at betterbidding. Not one single email asking me about anything they were unhappy with. They go straight to their lawyers and threaten a small operation with litigation.
What I ask of you is that you take into consideration betterbidding.com ’s actions. Some things you could do if you felt so inclined:
1) Don’t post your information there. You don’t even have to post it at Travelgoop. Post it at biddingfortravel.com or create your own site and post it there. You could name it bettergoopfortravel.com or something maybe a little more enticing.
2) Remove your content from betterbidding.com .
3) Tell fellow posters to try out suggestions #1 and #2.
4) Create bumper stickers and T-shirts
5) Bring the issue up at cocktail parties
6) Canvas your local neighborhood
7) Get a tattoo on your neck explaining the situation
Some of these are more doable than others. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to let me know and I can expand the list.
Until next time.
Marc
I have been really busy recently, but have had some time to re-do the filtering interface. Before you had to select from multiple disjointed dropdown menus. I don’t think it was very clear or intuitive. I took the interface of the Travelgoop Bid Wizard and applied it to the regular Travelgoop filter. Now, you select what website, area, and/or star level you want. Travelgoop will then filter your selection. This should be a solid improvement and will allow Travelgoopers to find pricing information more easily.
In addition, when you add your purchase information into Travelgoop you can now enter the full hotel price, leave comments and post hotel reviews.
1) By entering the optional hotel website listed price for your purchase, you can keep track of your savings. As you add purchases, Travelgoop keeps track of your total savings. While this isn’t ground breaking, it’s nice to see the savings add up over time. Have you saved over $1000 this year by using Priceline and/or Hotwire? Enter your purchase information and find out.
2) The purchase comments is a place for you to tell other Travelgoopers how you arrived at the purchase that you made. This could include strategy information or comments about how you researched the purchase or whether you are happy with the outcome. Really, anything that is related to the purchase should be put here. So your thoughts will live on and hopefully enlighten a future visitor.
3) The hotel reviews part of this isn’t fully implemented and I’m not sure what I am going to do there. There are already several hotel review websites out there, but I think it would be neat to have hotel reviews written by and for people getting them at a discount. I think one’s perspective of a hotel is different when you are staying there for half price.
It’s a formidable scent… It stings the nostrils. In a good way.
I have added hotel pages. This is ideal for if you are looking for a specific hotel or if you want to learn more about a hotel. I will be adding more information to these hotel pages when I get a chance. Hopefully, this will be a nice expansion.
Some of you will also notice that I changed the way that one enters a successful purchase. I added some more fields to provide more information (the advertised price on the hotel’s website for the same nights, purchase comments, hotel reviews, etc), although these are all optional. By entering in this information, you can keep track of your own savings and past strategies and hotel thoughts. It will be a nice tool for people to have in addition to other Travelgoop functions.
Sweet.
So, there are still small updates here and there. Definitely not as fast as furious as they were coming before. I have added the Travelgoop Bid Wizard link back to the site because I think it’s very cool. Just say what you want and for how much and the bid wizard will tell you what you need to do. You can find the link at the bottom left corner of the page under the Travelgoop Blog link.
I also added more interesting map functionality so that each page of data results in a marker on the map. I am still playing around with a couple of things here, but you get the gist.
Welcome to all the new users. May we all save some money with Travelgoop.
Until next time, stay clean.
Hotwire rolled out a new feature called Travel Ticker (http://www.hotwire.com/travelticker/). It resembles travelzoo.com in that it presents noteworthy deals that are available in all aspects of travel. Doing a quick survey of the hotels shows a 3* hotel for $59 and a mountain resort for $89. Sounds good to me. Not ground breaking, but worth checking out if you have a moment.
Priceline is running a promotion for a free iPod Shuffle “when you book an oceanview stateroom
or higher on select 7-night sailings”. The promotion ends June 30. If you are considering this type of vacation, you might as well book it at Priceline and snag this. They have competitive cruise prices, so it looks like a good deal to me.
I did a lot of behind the scenes work today. The search should be quicker. I also overhauled the hotel system, so now all hotels should be accessible for adding purchases. This means users no longer need to email me hotel entries when they want to enter something that isn’t there. The trade-off for this is that it only currently supports the US. I will try to improve upon this at some point to allow for hotel searching outside of the US.
People are continuing to sign up. Thank you everyone for submitting your purchases. We are all helping each other by contributing.
And I’m spent.