Home & Abroad est un site qui propose un ensemble de services et d'outils pour préparer son prochain voyage.

Mais c'est bien plus qu'un simple "Trip Planer".

Home & Abroad c'est à la fois de la technologie et des experts du tourime et des voyages.

Si vous connaissez Pandora qui est un "Music Genome", et bien je pense que Home & Abroad est un "Travel Genome" grâce à ce mariage entre la technologie Travel 2.0 + Les services d'expert de voyages + du User Generated Content + un partenariat exclusif avec Expedia + ...

Bon, le plus simple, c'est de donner la parole à Mark Schroeder CEO de Home&Abroad.

Il nous présente les principaux services et innovations de Home & Abroad ainsi que sa vision du travel 2.0

Très instructif !

> Mark, , can you tell some information about you?

I am co-founder and CEO of Home&Abroad, an application development company focused on building the industry-leading Trip Planner for travelers. Previously,Iwas the CEO of DigitalMed, a Tenet Healthcare-owned e-learning subsidiary. Prior to that he was the co-founder and CEO of e-vitro (1999), a human capital company specializing in providing online training and human capital services to nurses and allied health-care workers. Schroeder merged e-vitro into DigitalMed in 2000.

>You are the CEO of a great travel site, Home&Abroad., Can you tell us the story and some fact about it?

A couple of years ago my wife, Carla, and our two daughters, Rosie and Maya, took a year off and traveled through approx. 25 countries. I was assigned the trip planning and found myself spending an inordinate amount of time researching and planning the trip. Because we were schooling our daughters on the road, I was also looking for information on just the right books, CDS, DVDs, etc. that would help in our educational mission. Well, I couldn't find a website that optimized that planning and researching experience, so I decided to build Home&Abroad. We are quite excited by what we have learned over the past year about the travel industry and over the course of time that knowledge will be translated into addition refinements and additions to our web site.

>Can you give us some outline about your goals with Home&Abroad.!

We would like to build a Trip Planner that becomes the de facto website for anyone thinking of traveling. That means doing a better job at serving up just the right content and creating the right causal connections between that content and the products and services that flow naturally from it.

In addition, we would like to improve our core algorithims. That means expanding the variables and knowledge base that will enable a user to generate a great itinerary -- quickly. Put in another way, we would like the application to become smart enough to help a user detrmine on what day they should travel, what order they view attractions (or visit cities), what they should read, view, or listen to get a deeper aprpeciation of place, where they should stay based on their unique prefernce set, and more.

Lastly, we will be adding more content areas over the next year -- specifically, volunteer travel, family travel, and student travel.

On a side note: I have always been impressed by Foucault's Archaeology of Kowledge. A theoretical goal, one that has impact on our development, would be to create an analogous model for travel. The end result of this would lead, literally, to a travel genome.

> Who use Home&Abroad ? Any special profil and country for Home&Abroad group & community users?

Our typical user is a middle-to-uuper class Baby Boomer or GenX female who is educated and uses the Internet for research and travel purchases.

>Any advises for people who start to use Home&Abroad !

Have fun! If you are traveling with a family or group, build an itinerary using the Theme route. By using the filters, you can jump from theme to theme so that everyone will get their interest met. Or, adopt a trip submitted by another user, add your notes, and send it to someone you know.




> Home&Abroad is like a Virtual Travel Concierge but also you have a great team of Travel Expert around the World. Can you give us some explanation about this mix model (technology + Human travel ressources) ?

Our algorithims combine "super user" content and ratings with those provided by end users. We believe that it is critical to combine the two: super-user content (generally provided by a destination expert) tends to be more pragmatic, a little more objective; end user feedback is more subjective and intentional. One without the other provides only a partial view of the site-attraction being described.

>Travel 2.0 web site and Trip Planning Tools are a big trend in Internet travel space. What are the main advantage to use Home&Abroad ?

Our goal is to optimize the trip-planning process: to make it easy, fun, personal, all inclusive -- and fast. Our hope is that by using our application, travelers will be better informed, and therefore, more appreciative of the cultures they are visiting.

>Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0. What do you think about this evolution in the tourism & hotel market place ? Word-of-mouth marketing and User Generated Content are the big trends for Travel 2.0 ?

User generated content is great -- but limited. Travel 2.0 places a great emphasis on this type of content, but it is merely a matter of the pendelum swinging to the far side of the arc. We believe there has to be a combination of user-generated and expert content. More to the point: user-generated content reminds me of the Freudian "return of the repressed" -- that is, in many ways, it is a "desired" return to the oral paradigm (i.e., where a friend would pass on information about a great place); however, this kind of informal, subjective information is expressed in writing, and therefore its meaning and intentionality is elusive and often masks other agendae.




>We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, Google mashup,Vidéo etc), what is your point of view ? Do you plan to use more Web 2.0 stuff on Home&Abroad ?

We defintely plan on adding some more social networking components to the site, as well as blogging tools. A big push in this quarter is to modify our Knowledge Management and Publishing engine so that our private label clients can add additional information (like "Concierge Tips," etc.).

>What about your developpment and project for Home&Abroad ? We don't see much European cities, are you looking for Travel City Expert for this destinations ?

We are making a big push this year to add more European and Asian cities with a goal of having 200+ by the end of the year. We would be very interested in hearing from Travel Experts for European and Asian destinations.

>Can DMO's and Tourism Board become Home&Abroad Partners?

Absolutely!

The Austrian Tourist Office provides a good example of one of our relationships. They provided the expertise for Vienna and we are highlighted on their site, www.austria.info.

>What are your personal taste for:

>Travel: Love it! It's a critical component of education for people of all ages, especially now.

>Travel destination: Camino de Santiago....

>Hotel : Any hotel where one can meet interesting, different people -- there is often an inverse relationship between cost and experience:)

Merci Marck.

P.S : je fais une série d'interview en anglais, que je laisse en anglais pour 2 raisons principales.
je n'ai pas le temps de faire les traductions et puis je pense que pas mal de lecteurs du blog Les Explorers sont bilingue.

En attente de post, d'autres interviews de société travel 2.0.

J'en ai une petite dizaine dans le pipe. Stay Tune comme on dit !