Startups

If Airbnb- and CouchSurfing-type accommodations cause concern about their legalities and risks, these issues are not dissuading important investors.

Hipmunk has a lot of funding in the kitty. With Kourosh Karimkhany's hiring, perhaps a little M&A activity is in the cards?

Destination discovery/planning tool is a startup minefield & few have cracked it. Hopper's goal of using Big Data to catalogue travel flight and destination data is ambitious & admirable, though they're taken a lot of time and money for it.

Verbalizeit’s crowd-sourced translators are paid for their time, ensuring that travelers and business relying on the service for affordable and accessible translations will have help whenever it’s needed.

NextGreatPlace hopes to be the next great vacation club, but as in other trendy endeavors, it will have to prove that the model works.

Trover's team realized early on that people were neither planning itineraries nor connecting with frieds, so it switched to a Pinterest-like model that trades on inspiration rather than organization.

It's tough going for any social site that wants to focus on connection users with friends or even friends of friends who are traveling.

Car sharing services face their biggest challenges from gaining legitimacy from wary consumers as well as major players, such as the insurance industry. Backing from a car manufacturer goes a long way towards improving the odds on both of those.

Good competition in the space from likes of ReviewPro, TrustYou & others and then generalist social media tools, this money will surely be needed to scale/compete. Rich Barton gold dust helps too.

WeTrip hopes its focus on travel activities will set it apart in the inundated social travel market, but it will need to learn lessons from all who've gone before (and already pivoted).