Hello World
Welcome to Relavanti. It’s really a true pleasure to have you here.
In this first blog post, I’d like to explain a bit about Relavanti, and what it is meant to do.
Relavanti is a travel and tourism website, owned by Scopia LLC. It aims to help travelers find solutions more efficiently through relevance. Like all commercial websites, the goal is to make a profit. Yet, equally so, this site represents an ongoing journey through unchartered territories in search of a holy grail – relevance. More precisely, holistic relevance.
Defining relevance in travel is a tricky task, as every person on this planet has a unique perception of those trip parameters that are more important and those that are less. There is no single formula, complex as it may be, that can be implemented into all websites to create relevance for everyone. The formula must be written almost from scratch for every traveler and every new trip.
In my personal opinion, a trip is a universe of possibilities. As the traveler looks at all the elements in this universe using different lenses (perspectives), relevance is created. Holistic relevance is the result of combining multiple relevancies into one. It's kind of like using the conjunction “and” instead of “or”.
The attempt at achieving relevance while planning travel is the reason, I believe, people - travelers and even travel agents - spend many hours searching for solutions to theirs or their clients' travel needs. This is especially true when planning travel to a place that is not well known or previously visited. Hour after hour, search after search, the goal with Relavanti is to reduce the hours to seconds and create a business model around this service.
And, how exactly do you monetize relevance? Once the basis of relevance is created, the products produced from it will benefit clients of many types and in many different ways. Here are some examples:
- B2C Booking Platform for Travelers (partially available) - A free service where travelers can search for travel solutions, save searches, and book travel and tourism services. Revenue is from bookings and advertising.
- B2B Search Tool for Travel Agents - A subscription service that offers a more robust search, and more customization than the free platform.
- B2C Events (already available) - The user can register and create an event on Relavanti (wedding, high school reunion) and share the event link with all those invited. Any bookings for hotels, car rentals or activities will be shared between Relavanti and the user. The relevance comes into play when the person invited looks for activities not just around the location of the event, but also around every other location of her or his trip. The whole trip to the event becomes a universe of opportunities.
- B2B2C Third Party Widget - Similar to Relavanti Events, a widget will be a little button that can easily be installed on the website for any location, but especially for places like hotels, festivals, event venues and the like. Revenues from bookings on the widget will be shared with the site owner.
At the time of writing this blog entry, the wonderful development team at Esverito are working to help me create the first two and most basic relevancies: geographic and scheduling. It isn’t just about which airports are nearest to Petra in Jordan, but also which airlines fly to those airports. And it isn’t just about the nearest seaports to Puerto Princesa in the Philippines, but also which cruise lines stop at those ports. From these two basic relevancies the project will continue to branch out into new territories of discovery and unique capabilities, hopefully making travel planning easier and more efficient, as the results become more relevant.
I invite you to explore Relavanti, kick the tires a bit and take it out for a spin. Try searching for 1-4 locations and filtering the search results. Click on "Air" to see airports and "Sea" to see seaports. There’s also a “How To” page that better explains the functionalities of the site. At the bottom of the page there is a "Feedback" button, where you are welcome to let us know what we can do differently or better.
Please keep in mind Relavanti is still in development, meaning there may be data inaccuracies and annoying little glitches. I hope you find it useful or at the very least, interesting.
Again, welcome and thanks for stopping by!
Ophir