Travel Planners Overwhelm the Afternoon at the Travel Innovation Summit

(MoneyWatch)  The first day is done, and I've amazingly sat through every single presentation today. Some of these "innovators" have more promise than others, without question, and many seem to blur together with their similar ideas. For example, there were a slew of travel planning tools that, while having differentiating factors, generally do the same basic thing.

Sites like Cadabra (for New Zealand and soon other places), TripSketch, Travelmuse, AdventureLink (for adventure travel), YourTour, NileGuide, Triporati, UpTake, and PlanetEye are all focused on helping people build their travel plans. This is great, but how is anyone supposed to know which site is best? More importantly for our purposes on this blog, if you're a travel supplier, you'll want your business to show up and be represented positively. Do you really have to monitor all of these?

I would say that the answer is yes, for now. You clearly can't spend very much time doing this since there are so many sites out there, but it's still important to closely monitor your brand. My guess is that this will be a temporary problem. There's no way all these sites will stay around, especially when there's no clear monetization path for many. As people continue to try these sites, some will emerge as more popular and others will disappear completely. Ultimately it will be easy to monitor what's happening. For now it will take some time to monitor them all, but it's probably worth it. One bad review or some incorrect information could hurt your business significantly.