The problem FunnelScope addresses is that even with all the available online content, travel research requires a lot of work and is not a pleasant experience. Does anyone enjoy searching for travel? In fact, all the available online information makes it more painful. On top of that, none of the online resources account for quality content from your social circles. That requires an entirely separate effort. Currently there is no efficient way to marry recommendations from friends and online content. FunnelScope seeks to dramatically change that with exciting innovations.
In the alpha launch, now available, FunnelScope addresses the first part of this problem: time and effort to gather information. FunnelScope aggregates ratings and reviews from all the major travel sites and combines them into a single aggregate score. This is FunnelScope’s aggregate web score for the hotel. FunnelScope takes it a step farther by then analyzing, categorizing, and scoring all the online travel reviews from the major travel sites. It categorizes and rates each hotel for the top attributes that reviewers describe in reviews as determining a good or bad stay at a hotel: bed quality, bathroom quality, room size, room quality, service quality, food, romantic, kid-friendly, pool quality, and so forth. FunnelScope takes its proprietary attribute scores and mashes it with the aggregate web scores to create a unique rating for hotels. FunnelScope offers a feature unavailable on anywhere else, which is to allow users to read the specific reviews categorized for that attribute.
The last, but very critical aspect, of FunnelScope’s rankings is to take into account ratings from users’ social circles via their social networks. A friend’s rating for a hotel will boost it in the rankings, resulting in personalized rankings for users (both by attributes and input from friends). If users want, they can search directly from their status box by sending a Tweet or a Facebook status update (coming soon) with @Funnelscope in the message. For example, a user can say, “@funnelscope looking for a hotel near the sights in Boston to take the kids”. FunnelScope will understand the request and will send back a @reply with a link to hotel results that rate high for family-friendly and tourist-friendly based on reviews from top online review sites. In this manner users receive highly structured and organized results from all the major travel and review sites PLUS their friends input. This eliminates the separate efforts in travel search and provides the best travel reviews.
According to Kul Singh, FunnelScope’s Founder, “The online travel search space is no doubt crowded, but it seems that companies have stopped innovating in the last few years. FunnelScope sees numerous ways to make travel search more efficient, social, and fun. We think that is the killer app in such an important market. We have just started on our very exciting vision.”
