Tripalong - MakeMyTrip's Attempt at 'Social Travel! Would It Work?

Keeping with its tradition of innovative services, MakeMyTrip has come up with Tripalong, a fun way to travel as claimed by them. It is also called as 'social travel' and is a silent revolution which might turn out to be a big boom in future. Just imagine, how travel has only increased over time, be it due to relocation, study abroad and other reasons. In fact, data shows that travel is the most shopped item online globally, standing at 65% in India. The number of transactions or volume might be low, but the value is high. What was the value of you last air ticket as compared to your online spend on books or apparels?!? :) And NASDAQ listed MakeMyTrip being the leader gets tremendous advantage of the same.

At the same time, imagine the number of people on Facebook and Twitter during their travel. In fact, all social networking websites are all into geosocial networking as well (Like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Facebook Places, Twiiter location checkin, etc.) What if we connect the dots? That's where social travel comes and MakeMyTrip is truly a pioneer in this space with the help of Tripalong. 

Tripalong simply tells you who all from your Facebook or Linkedin might be with you or at the city/airport at the time of your travel. More interestingly, Tripalong also gives you info on people who are going to be in your flight and shows their profile. This also means, your profile would be visible to others who are travelling at the same time.

If interested, you may meet them or sit together! That's great for anyone willing to network or date. YouTube and Yahoo! Answers were criticized for being more of a social networking and dating website than adhering to their purpose. I foresee an unintended consequence like that in case of Tripalong, it might turn out to be a dating site!

It is subjective whether a person would like to meet new people or not. Access to services like Tripalong would be more welcome by those who are social and have active presence on Facebook. So, we can expect a chunk of youngsters coming on this. 

Image Credit: Laughing Squid

However, imagine a single girl getting requests from a complete stranger on the service to sit together with a boy. The boy knows the flight time and name of the girl... It is like exposing yourself to strangers completely. Considering the hullabaloo about privacy these days (criticism surprisingly comes from most people who have never read a privacy policy of any website), Tripalong is not very likely to take off. 

As a matter of fact, I wonder why do people add unknown people or untrustworthy people on Facebook and LinkedIn? Life would be so much more fun if you felt free in meeting any of your FB or LinkedIn connections. But, most people who have become vary of privacy lately (the fad of privacy) would not give this a try at all. There is an option to sync your own MakeMyTrip account as well, which will automatically update your flight schedule in Tripalong profile, of course with your permission. And please note that anyone can update their flight schedule, it is not necessary to have booked from MakeMyTrip.

On the contrary, Twitter is not connected to the account. I guess, celebrities would face a huge problem if their travel plans all became public. Also, Twitter does not have a two way interaction like FB and LinkedIn. Somebody may follow you, but you may not follow them back.

A positive side which I see to social travel (assuming it would be adopted by people) is for the sales and marketing folks. The business development executives can know when a CXO person is travelling and try to get into that flight. Just for the meeting, they might make the trip which would have lesser cost than arranging a meeting at another city with 2/3 days of stay. But, something like this is not going to work for long.

Due to various other reasons, I would say Tripalong is for those people who are travel enthusiasts, for those who are willing to take a risk and keep their travel plan out in the open for the world to see and meet new people. It is good to see that MMT is not spending money on publicizing this but keeping it for the enthusiast to explore. Reminds me of CouchSurfing, which was never intended for the general audience but only the enthusiasts!

Talking about social travel, an interesting info-graphic explains the social travel revolution theoretically using numbers. It does not talk however, on why social travel never took off anywhere in the world!