TravelShark Blog

Women in Tech: SheSays Boulder and Where I Fit in

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:00:00 BST

As Madeline Albright once said, “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

This is especially true in the startup tech community, because there are so few women working in digital, and without strong networks, this space can seem intimidating and inaccessible. ... Read More

Source: Women in Tech: SheSays Boulder and Where I Fit in at SharkPix.

Relaxing in Krabi: A Sharky Thailand Itinerary

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:30:00 BST

Singapore is truly a blessed country. Apart from what feels like 365 days of summer, we’ve got loads of outstanding food, lush parkland for picnics and biking, terrific shopping, intriguing cultural activities sprouting from every nook and now even a Universal Studios. What more could you ask for? ... Read More

Source: Relaxing in Krabi: A Sharky Thailand Itinerary at SharkPix.

Team TravelShark Dives Beneath the Surface During Dinner with Chairman David Leppan

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:23:00 BST

We’d been sitting only a few minutes when we got a message from David Leppan saying he was stuck in traffic and that we should order a bottle of wine.

“Order a bottle of wine?” asked one of my coworkers, “I don’t know anything about wine!”

While David Leppan, TravelShark’s Chairman and Co-Founder, meets frequently with the board and senior executive team, this kind of meeting—dinner with a handful of the company’s 20-something-year-old US office staff members—was the first of its kind. It was by luck, and a little last-minute planning, that the seven of us, most only a few years out of college, had been able to attend. The timing had been serendipitous: a few were in New York City just for the occasion, but most had already planned on being in the city for one reason or another. A couple of us were spending the week building content for TravelShark's New York Hotels site.

I looked around the table, elaborate menues already laid out on our plates. Dinners like this don’t come around too often, not at TravelShark, or anywhere else, for that matter. We were all so nervous and excited to meet David for the first time that we could barely talk about anything else in his absence; how could we even think about picking a bottle of wine?

David was charming right off the bat, apologizing for his late appearance with a casual joke. He quickly ordered something for us to drink off the menu—a task that had seemed impossible only moments before—before diving right into conversation.

He began to tell us about himself, sharing both anecdotes from his adventures around the world and descriptions of his other companies, WealthX and Billionaire.com (coming soon). He explained that while WealthX and Billionaire.com were quite compatible and interconnected, TravelShark—well, TravelShark was something else altogether.

To our surprise, we barely talked about work. We’d expected our conversation to focus on our roles at the company, but then again, none of us really knew what to expect. Aside from a few stories about the shark suit’s effect on New York (more to come on this later), we spent most of the night talking about our own lives, interests, and experiences.

David’s authenticity put us at ease. He went around asking each of us about our passions, and we all gave genuine, personal answers. What would our last meal on earth be—a few immediately knew that they’d opt for a hamburger, while others, David included, insisted that this meal would have to have multiple courses. Everyone laughed a lot, and by the time dessert was served, it seemed crazy that I’d been nervous at all.

As we were finishing our food, it struck me that we all have something in common aside from our involvement with TravelShark: we all like to travel. Sure, it might seem obvious—we do, after all, work for a travel company—but somehow, it hadn’t fully occurred to me before. Yet, as we spent the night chatting, it seemed that nearly everyone in the room had expressed a sense of adventure and zest for life that you only find when travelling.

In the end, the dinner with David was quite the treat, but not only in the ways I’d expected. We'd enjoyed a gourmet New York meal (any meal that ends with chocolate is a success in my book), and spent a memorable evening with the company’s Chairman. I’d also decided, based on my interactions with David, and with my coworkers, that even though we all seemed so different, we have a few very, very crucial things in common.

Becca Schwartz is a chocoholic from New York City who started at TravelShark as a Content Associate last fall. She loves telling stories about how much she loves the Rocky Mountains just as much as she loves telling stories about how much she loves Central Park, but nothing compares to her love for travel.

Source: Team TravelShark Dives Beneath the Surface During Dinner with Chairman David Leppan at SharkPix.

The Travelling Developer and Singapore Tech Startup Culture

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:09:00 BST

In general, web developers do not receive many opportunities to travel for work. Most are confined to the stereotypical cubical. So, when TravelShark proposed that I work in Singapore for six months, it was easy to jump right on a plane. I had to say, "YES!"

Once I arrived in Singapore, it didn’t take me long to realize how it was already becoming a great power in the entrepreneurial world. ... Read More

Source: The Travelling Developer and Singapore Tech Startup Culture at SharkPix.

How to Create a Sharky Singapore Itinerary

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:54:00 BST

As the sun dawns over this tiny red dot, Singapore's wet markets are already abuzz with the shouts and laughter of locals snapping up fresh fish, veggies and fruit for the day's meals to come. Chickens pace and squawk in their cages, freshly caught fish splatter water about in plastic tubs and wrinkled old men sit idly by smoking, a game of Chinese chess just begun. This is the Singapore you don't read about in the Financial Times, a marvelous food mecca bursting with Asian flavor and hidden gems, a wanderer's paradise. ... Read More

Source: How to Create a Sharky Singapore Itinerary at SharkPix.

When Trying to Open Doors Abroad, Language is your Key.

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:08:00 GMT

Whether you’re a hardcore traveler, have barely flown on airplanes, or just like to get away sometimes, language is essential to any trip. Here are 5 tips to get you started:

Learn the basics. Simple phrases like “Please,” “Thank you,” “I would like,” and “Where is” can go a long way. Not only are you being polite—you’re using phrases that are necessary for everyday life. Have you ever tried asking someone to call a doctor when you don’t know the word for “doctor?” Trust me. Charades only work for so long. ... Read More

Source: When Trying to Open Doors Abroad, Language is your Key. at SharkPix.

Hotel Marlowe: Making Pet-Friendly more People Friendly

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:07:00 GMT

We’ve all been there. You’ve got your foot out the door, about to leave for a big trip. The dog-sitter is all set. Then, just as you grab your keys, your canine best friend tilts their head, giving you that irresistible how-could-you-leave-me sad-eye stare. Well, plans are made to be broken. But how on earth are you going to find a hotel for both of you? ... Read More

Source: Hotel Marlowe: Making Pet-Friendly more People Friendly at SharkPix.

We laugh a lot at work. Time to laugh more with our users.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 GMT

This morning I met with a Boulder travel startup that has built a community-oriented B-to-B-to-C online Saas product. The co-founders wanted to share the new software release with me and get my feedback. The product was much-improved, and I expressed my appreciation for the functionality enhancements.

Then I looked at the big picture, and I tapped into my gut. I wasn’t feeling an emotional connection to the product at all. The product offering addresses operational features (left-brain stuff) and marketing/customer relationship features (right-brain stuff). I felt a disappointing “miss” on the latter, particularly for an offering about travel—a segment rich with emotional potential. I blurted: “I’m not seeing the LOVE here. I want to land on this page and feel inspired and connected and moved, and instead I notice clean functionality.” I also asked whether they had shown this to any other women – the reliable keepers of emotional and community glue.

For me, their sales pitch was simple: To a CFO, talk about cost savings and pragmatic benefits of replacing dated systems; to the CMO, talk about the LOVE this product will engender – affection and excitement for the trip, the tour company, the experience, co-trippers, and more.

New Year Note to Team TravelShark: A Players All

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:52:35 GMT

[[I thought I'd share the note I shared with the team today]]

TravelShark Team:

I'm finding the Steve Jobs biography to be among the most influential books I've read in ages…if not ever. I wanted to share the jolt I got from it this morning with all of you.

Today's learning was about Jobs' fanatical adherence to A players. He wasn't unique to caring about this. Jim Collins in Good to Great, Jack Welch from GE both have quite intense thoughts on this point, as do others, but Jobs was almost intolerant of anything but "A's." The book describes Jobs' view of hiring only A player developers for the engineering team at Apple. Others told Jobs that those people would "never get along" or enjoy working with eachother, but Jobs stuck to his instincts, believing that A players hated working with C players.

He surmised that the difference between an A player and an average player was about 30% in terms of performance (his tendency to boil hunches down to seemingly colorable metrics with conviction is wonderful I think -- and in this case probably right), and so he set about to find people that were orders of magnitude better than average. The book recounts an instance in which an engineer interviewed at Apple, but things went poorly. Jobs spotted the candidate in the lobby after the interviews, and the candidate, despondent, showed Jobs a demo he had prepared showing how the icons in the work tray on a desktop could be magnified on mouseover for ease of usability. Jobs hired that engineer and the spot, and we know where that feature ended up.... Read More

Source: New Year Note to Team TravelShark: A Players All at SharkPix.

TravelShark Takes Content Function to Cutting Edge with Kapost

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:40:00 GMT

We’ve made a really tremendous shift here in how we handle operations and work flow associated with our major content-generation activities for our sites. We thought you might like to hear a bit about it.

Two months ago, we were struggling with how to add automation and scale to our content efforts – which today involve a substantial number of local “editors,” who generate current articles and stories of interest to support our hyper-local travel sites, which market major destinations as well as sites covering Las Vegas Hotels, Singapore Hotels, and hundreds of other hotel markets around the world. Our needs grew geometrically after TravelShark acquired 80 premium location-based domains. We had to bolster our content output, while also maintaining quality and operational standar... Read More

Source: TravelShark Takes Content Function to Cutting Edge with Kapost at SharkPix.

TravelShark Sharky Awards Launch, Cupcakes Involved

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:37:25 GMT

Sometimes work is about work, but sometimes, it’s about dessert. I really like those latter occasions. And, since I have some discretion here at TravelShark, many of my favorite decisions involve food, more specifically: frosting. I can always find a business rationale for cupcakes.

This week we launched the Sharky Awards, an honor bestowed upon unique and unexpected discoveries in travel. To celebrate the launch and our four inaugural “sharky” recipients, we literally delivered cupcakes around the globe. First stop: Boston, to the Hotel Marlowe for Sharkiest Pet Love. Second: Seattle, to the Ace Hotel for Sharkiest Shower. Third: Hawaii, to Eddie Mahoney, at the Hyatt Regency Maui for Sharkiest Stargazer. Fourth: Singapore, to the good people at the Hotel Quincy, named for Sharkiest Perquisites (because who doesn’t love a few extra perks?). Now, for you time-zone sticklers, it is true that Singapore rightfully should have gotten their dessert first, but the fact is you can’t embargo a press release in America and meet the need in Singapore at the same time. Fortunately, no one really complains about the hour at which unexpected treats arrive at their hotel.

There are two things worth discussing here.

First, why did we create the Sharky Awards at all?

Fair question. Our company’s mission is to connect travelers around the world with hyper-local travel information and memorable trips. Here’s what we saw going on in the market: awards being offered by major media companies and magazines primarily lauding luxury properties in high-end destinations. We saw a wealth of unfiltered, uncurated reviews on hotel sites providing very little filter or barometer of unbiased quality. We saw that consumers actually save articles from discerning resources like the New York Times, which do a nice job of revealing off-the-beaten path locations and reviewing vacation hot-spots with honesty.

What we didn’t see, and what the Sharky Awards provide, is a number of truly standout suggestions for absolutely can’t-miss, jaw-dropping people, places, or things that you will probably not read about on TripAdvisor. So, we decided to give these above-and-beyond gems an award commending them for exactly what they seem to be after – breaking the mold of the travel experience, or, as we say, being “sharky.”

We believe that leveraging our in-market editors – including those that research and write our rather travel guides – to identify and recognize these finds supports the trip-planner that seeks an experience with a bit of delight tossed in. We think the concept encourages destinations, suppliers, and hospitality staffers to be thinking with this “sharky” mindset more and more. And, we think that showcasing Sharky Awards winners on our sites will make our sites and our business stronger, more accessible, and unique.

Second, why cupcakes? Well. Because everyone likes cupcakes, of course. Just take a look at our award-winners enjoying theirs on launch day:

Check out our Sharky Awards Winners, and please, if you spot something that fits the bill, nominate a Sharky today! We’ll be awarding new Sharky Awards every few weeks starting with this first bite!

Hotel Marlowe Team Showing their Dog Love

Eddie Mahoney is a Sharky Star in Maui

Source: TravelShark Sharky Awards Launch, Cupcakes Involved at SharkPix.

Flipping the Funnel from Online Deduction to Discovery

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:11:00 BST

Today was a particularly cool (or as we say, “sharky”) day at TravelShark. Following on our acquisition of eat.shop guides in September, we were able to share the news that we’ve rebranded the hyper-local city guides as rather™ and launched the new www.rather.com.

I love this rebrand. We are embracing the idea that independent and exploratory locals and travelers alike would “rather” choose to experience a new city (or their home city) from the inside, as an exploration.

The rather city mobile apps around the book content are in progress, and the ideation for those got me thinking. As we sat around a table in a product meeting, we naturally gravitated to all manner of sophisticated searching and filtering tools. Then someone said, “hey, why not just create a button that says ‘tempt me,’ and then let’s just serve up one tantalizing photo of one venue in the city.” Then I sat up and paid attention (not a huge change from the norm, I promise).

I realized that true “experience” is not a deductive process but an inductive process. For every year since infancy – when we are models of discovery and openness to everything – we are taught to hone our deductive skills; to drill down from the many to the few. The perceived push towards efficiency seems to require this given the many demands on our time. On the web, the enormous quantity of content available has made hyper-filtration of data for the “perfect search result” a many-billion dollar sector.

But with rather, and with many things in life, it can be more fun to go for a stroll than to take a fast cab to the perfect diner. This is both literal and figurative. The point is that if users trust the curator of restaurants and shops, let’s say, truly superb content is better consumed by dabbling, ambling, sampling, being leisurely.

Experiencing great suggestions like those in rather books or those in any content source in which one has confidence is a matter of creative discovery and opportunity. It’s inductive. The funnel is flipped, and super-charged search and filtering become less important than just metaphorically paging through the options, getting inspired, visualizing what a night out might feel like. All the options are rich and wonderful, so you’d rather appreciate more than be exposed to less. Pinpoint accuracy and hyper-filtered search can create a myopia that might make it tough to see the unexpected finds around the “search result.”

In this new mindset, we decided in that meeting to eliminate much of that advanced search functionality on our coming-soon rather apps. We will offer users a chance to stroll, to feel the vibe of a place, to take a mobile jaunt through rather cities. This will take all manner of forms in the app, and I look forward to sharing it when it’s ready.

That seems pretty relevant today to how I’m thinking about new products for TravelShark in our objective of being the leading source of curated, personalized, objective hyper-local content around the globe. Look forward to your thoughts.

Source: Flipping the Funnel from Online Deduction to Discovery at SharkPix.

TravelShark is about candid, curated content. So is this blog.

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:51:00 BST

It’s a big day at the Shark. One of those awesome days in the office where the buzz goes to 11. It’s a perfect day for our first post in a blog that will feature highlights (and the inevitable lower lights) of our ride as an online travel startup.

The day is super because we can at last share the news of today’s acquisition of eat.shop guides, publisher of hip, hyper-local city guides that feature thousands of independent “gems” in the world’s top travel destinations. I will post this, before my far younger employees hammer me for the use of “hip.”

Why do I love these little square books? They’re packed with picks of independent “finds” that locals usually keep to themselves. Next, this content has never been on the web, opening up all manner of cool opportunities in the digital and mobile realm. But perhaps most important: eat.shop content is 100% independent–uninfluenced by advertising or pay-for-play. I realize we can have an endless philosophical dialog about “truth,” “bias,” and subjectivity (and if you want to buy me an IPA in person or comment here, I’m game for that), but by most standards, this content is as candid as you’ll find.

At TravelShark, we’ve been focused on connecting global travelers with hyper-local, unbiased travel recommendations. We walk the walk on candor here, not only in terms of how we think about our brand and our online travel offerings, but also in terms of how we run our company. I’m actually smiling as I write this wondering when the last time anyone who works here kissed up to me. Alas.

If you caught our media announcement about our recent rebranding, you might have seen this thread. We ignored our PR advisors, jettisoned the standard rationales about high-minded strategy, and just admitted that our old name was rubbish. I donned a shark suit in the heat of summer to reinforce that our new name is just much more fun.

Why do we care about candor? Well, we believe a focus on candor across every aspect of what we do will make our employees happier, make our workplace more invigorating, make our products more innovative, and make our company more valuable.

Our goal is to be the go-to source for wonderful travel tools that deliver original, curated, and candid content for destinations around the world. Making this happen requires a long-term view of building a company versus other abundant shorter-term goals. It means we turn down some advertising to retain our vow to our users. It means we hire qualified people that are driven to create media that will make a difference to our company, and to travel.

In this blog, as in our company’s offerings, you’ll find the same theme of candor. We’ll be sharing our thoughts about the industry, running a startup, the challenges we face, the comical mistakes we make, and the opportunities we see. Talk back. Challenge us. We can’t wait!

Source: TravelShark is about candid, curated content. So is this blog. at SharkPix.