As I spent a lot of time this week reviewing YowTRIP’s business plan and its goals, and I started thinking more about our competitors (or at least the big online travel social networks) and how we compare with them. I’m not sure yet who I’d say are our direct competitors, as I’m still compiling that list, but I’m going to compare a couple of travel sites I have been following and admire: Tripit and Dopplr.

What prompt me to compare these travel site with YowTRIP was the latest blog post from Dopplr announcing their new public profile feature. Tripit announced theirs last month. Of course, YowTRIP has always offered a public profile since when we went public in September.

In case you don’t know about Tripit and Dopplr, here’s a quick overview:

Tripit: San Francisco-based. $6.1M funding. “Travel organizer. Simply forward your airline/hotel confirmation emails and they build a travel itinerary.”

Dopplr: Helsinki/London-based. (Couldn’t confirm funding, but for the sake of comparison let’s say $2M - I’ve heard it was much more). “Social service for frequent travelers to share future travel plans with friends and colleagues.”

YowTRIP:Boulder-based. ~$5K bootstrapping. “Social platform for world travelers. It helps you to meet other like-minded people to travel with and create travel groups.”

So, as you can see, both Tripit and Dopplr have gotten a little more funding than I have and several people contributing to their products. I have worked on YowTRIP by myself (part-time) - with help only with my press releases. One interesting factor, all of us launched around the same time (September 2007)

So, as I mentioned before, I don’t see these companies as “competitors”, but I wanted to compare YowTRIP with them, as they’re doing very well in the online travel market share. We happen to be in the same industry, targeting different audiences, however as expected, some things might overlap here and there.

Now, let’s compare their profile pages with YowTRIP’s.

Let’s start with Tripit’s profile. I’m not sure if they actually have a public profile yet. I think this snapshot is for their user’s profile (must be logged in to see it.) Two things YowTRIP doesn’t have (yet): the user travel stats (I have the city stats), and the user RSS feed, so people can follow updates (I have an option that non-members can subscribe for email updates when the user enters a new travelog.)

Now, let’s look at Dopplr’s just released public profile. I like the google map with recent visited cities. Another feature Dopplr has that is not illustrated by this snapshot is that their public profile is completely modular. You can display additional information if you choose so. That has been an option on my huge laundry list of things to do on yowTRIP for the longest time.

And now, YowTRIP’s public profile. Yes, I know, it’s huge. We display everything about that user. It’s worth to point out that the user can choose to have their public profile disabled. The public profile is very similar to the logged in profile, except you can’t access other member’s profiles from it. Remember our goal is to connect world traveler so they can meet and travel together, therefore it’s very important to get as much information about them as possible, so they can decide if they share similar travel interests.

As I said early on, I’ll continue to follow these two travel companies as well as others. I’ve been compiling a list of sites in the travel industry and how we compare and differentiate with them in the next few days.

Everybody knows travel and the Internet are my two passions, so YowTRIP is the perfect combination. It’s very exciting when I see new members joining or new news coverage on other bogs. It’s also very rewarding to see other travel sites visiting YowTRIP to benchmark our features (I can track it via I-stats;))

Since I got your attention this far, YowTRIP is looking for investment to be able to become more competitive in our segment of the travel industry. If you’re an angel investor, VC, or anybody who wants to get into the multi-billion dollars travel industry, please contact me.