New startup, Goby, finds niche in the travel market

Goby, a new startup based in Boston doesn’t consider itself just another travel site. Rather than offering plane tickets and hotel rooms, Goby’s selling point is that it pulls together listings of events, attractions, and such at your target destination, based on your target dates. Here’s their walkthrough:

Goby poses three questions: What, Where and When. By answering just two of these in any combination, users instantly receive an easy-to-read results page. It includes detailed information about attractions, activities, locations and events. It also contains an interactive map and photos from Google and Flickr.

My 15-minute test found Goby needs to stock up on data for me to search. I told it I wanted to lie on the beach in Maine this weekend, which I really do. Goby returned a pretty picture of a fortune cookie and the text, “We currently have no results for this search query.”

CEO Mark Watson emailed me in response:

You’ll get better results at the moment by searching with shorter searches, e.g. “beaches” rather than “lie on a beach”. Here’s our Maine beaches (note it includes lake beaches as well as ocean beaches.) Our system understands searches for either category names (e.g. “beaches”), as well as open text searches – we process the latter much as would a traditional search engine, and literally find results that contain the words “lie on a beach”. An area for improvement for us.

Several investors clearly think Goby’s found itself a viable niche here in the highly competitive online travel industry. Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners have invested in the company, along with other unnamed investors, although the actual funding amounts haven’t been disclosed.

I like the idea of Goby, but to become everyone’s dream destination they’ll need to shovel a lot more What, Where and When into the machine.

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