The TravelGround Blog

Business is changing. Where there used to be large hierarchical corporations that had power, it is now rather through decentralization and mass collaboration that many quality products and services are being created. (Wikinomics!)

One of the most fundamental aspects of Zissu Travel is being able to harness this new power that the internet has created to generate travel and tourism information for you. Who knows the most about all the best travel places, events, area information, and activities around South Africa? Well, the very accommodation owners and travelling users that will be using our site! That’s why every single piece of information that you find on Zissu Travel; whether it’s a town description, gallery of images of a region, activities in a certain area, or information about accommodation that will best suit your needs, is all written and collected by our users. Yes you, the users.

Accommodation owners will be able to add activities and events in their local area, create new area names and collaborate on wikis on their local area with descriptions and pictures. Users will also be able to write articles about their journeys, comments on the places where they stayed and add and locate their pictures on our maps for others to see. In this way, through many people adding small bits of information, we can create something that is more powerful and useful than any central group of professionals. Thus our job then, as the Zissu Travel team, is to create the framework that allows for this to happen.

Of course, Zissu Travel’s main goal to find users the best accommodation as quickly and easily as possible. Thus we will take this large wealth of information and analyze it to allow for the most advanced accommodation search on the net. Just specifiying a date, price range, and location is a thing of the past, and it’s Zissu Travel that is going to lead that change.

There are thus two features to Zissutravel that make us better than the rest. The first is the decentralization of information generation to you the users, using the enormous power mass collaboration. The second is creating algorithms that can put all this information at your fingertips, making finding the best accommodation as simple as typing a few keywords into our Zissu Search Bar. Zissu’s indexing algorithms and a little help of tens of thousands of people around the world will do the rest. That is the power of mass collaboration.

Hey there!

Welcome to the ZissuTravel blog As this is the first post on the blog, I’m going to take a little time to introduce you to the Zissu Project – specifically: what we’re doing, who we are, and a couple of other interesting things that you may like to know about ZissuTravel! In the future, the team is going to be using this blog to document the progress of our work, and explain cool new features as they are created.

What We’re Doing

Having done a fair bit of travelling ourselves, we’ve found a huge lack of accommodation websites that offer an intelligent search. Many will allow the user to search in a specific price or quality range, but few allow the user to be very specific about what they’re looking for. More generally, we’ve noticed that there is a lack of innovation in the online travel/accommodation field, and even the best sites up at the moment offer very mundane and mediocre services, searches and interfaces.

ZissuTravel plans to change all of that. With the use of an extremely clever indexing and searching algorithms, ZissuTravel users will be able to search for very detailed accommodation, through an uncomplicated search bar.

Here’s an example search: ” cape town sea view with three bedrooms and en-suite”

Furthermore, the Zissu search allows you to look for accommodation that is closely located to a specific activity. Planning a golf tour? Searching “Golf Garden-Route two bedrooms under 400″ will give a list of accommodation along the Garden Route, that is close to a golf course, with two bedrooms and for less than R400 per person per night.

Furthermore, ZissuTravel is packed with useful search features such as a Google Maps© implementation on our results page. Now, there are many travel sites that have a simple Google Map© with a few limited ways to search the map. Most have the option of either searching by map, or by doing a sort of textual/picture search where small snippets of each hotel are listed. ZissuTravel’s results page is going to combine the best of both worlds, having a Google Map to show location, but also text and picture snippets alongside, with some very clever interplay between them.  For example, if you hover over a icon on the map, the snippet for that hotel lights up, and visa versa. If you click on a snippet, it zooms the map on the hotel, showing pictures of the surrounds from Panoramia© and all the activities the area offers. (all while still being able to read about the hotel in its information snippet) Our results page is crammed with these sorts of useful features!

At ZissuTravel, we know that it’s not just the users of the site that we need to think of, it is also the accommodation suppliers that will use our site. With that in mind, we have created a site that is not only easy to use for accommodation suppliers, but also really powerful. Signing up your accommodation is free, and once done, each supplier has their own homepage, where they can manage their account. This homepage is also packed with lots of features, including: Managing all information that is displayed for each establishment, uploading pictures, writing descriptions, setting seasonal pricing structures etc.. From this homepage suppliers can view and manage their bookings and enquiries, add acitvities around them and send messages to other suppliers, users and the ZissuTravel team using our Zissu Messaging Machine. One of our biggest attractions is the supplier’s statistics page. Here, they can view stats about anything and everything on the site, from their prices compared to others in their area, to what keywords people searched to get to their page.

At first ZissuTravel is going to focus on the South African travel market (our home country), but we plan to expand into more regions as soon as we’re happy we have an excellent product. The way we have structured the ZissuTravel site and how information builds up within it our site is very generic, and needs little work to extend to other regions. We do this by building up all our information about the regions through our suppliers and users; the people who know their areas best.

Who We Are

All being co-founders, we are committed to creating the most powerful and innovative accommodation search on the web; we are:

Justin Womersley – Responsible for front end development (what ZissuTravel looks like, and how it works) & general team management.
Jonathan Womersley – Backend development (Hardcore ZissuTravel algorithms!) & finances
David McLennan – Frontend development & database management (although David can pretty much do anything!)
Nick Smit – Frontend – development & server management
Marcel van de Ghinste – Project management and strategic planning for Zissu Travel

Launch Date

The Zissu team is aiming to have a public beta up by the end of April, with a few intermediate development sites up before then. We are continuously planning and thinking of new features, and after launch will continue to add these to the site. An example of this is a trip planner that suggests different routes and regions to visit. For example, if “surfing student two weeks” was entered, we would recommend the best surfing spots around South Africa and accommodation that suits a student budget.