All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation. — Benedict Evans
Every few months I ask you to give me a hand in reaching a wider audience. If you make it to the end of the newsletter, there are some freebies you might get in return for your help. Thank you so much for helping me build Travel Tech Essentialist.
This newsletter is sponsored by
Equeco is the performance marketing automation platform for travel.
Findhotel, Kiwi.com, Voyage Privé, VeryChic and 650+ hotels seamlessly integrated Equeco to their campaigns and achieved 2 to 3 digits growth whilst automation markedly reduced their operational costs.
Equeco leverages a sole product feed to advertise your inventory on Google Search, Display, Hotel Search, Maps, Facebook and other channels.
Find out more here.
1. The future of search is boutique
Sari Azout writes that in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough for horizontal search engines to organize the world’s information. It becomes increasingly important to organize the world’s trustworthy information. On the other hand, vertical search aggregators work when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want isn’t usually the starting point, which creates an opportunity to help the overwhelmed consumer with better discovery and curation along the funnel by building boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways. Read + a16z.
2. Boutique search engines for travel content, startups and investors
The above dynamic led me to launch a couple of boutique searchable datasets last year:
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Travel Startups & Investors interactive dataset. A dataset of 945 (and growing) travel startups and 2064 VCs and angels across 76 countries and 343 cities with total funding of $44 billion. The startups are categorized in 8 macro categories and 256 micro categories. The dataset is updated weekly.
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Travel Research & Insights interactive dataset. A searchable and weekly updated…