[afarrell]

> quality content independent of sponsorship has yet to surface

Can you name some places where it does exist? The only one that comes to mind is Wikimedia, but I suspect thats because I just don't know that much about their funding.

HN, for example, is sponsored by ycombinator.

[somada141]

Sadly that was my point, I can think of none. The standard places like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Google, etc all fall under the category of crowdsourced and highly-susceptible to advertising agendas.

Sad as it is, travel is a hard category to get unbiased information on given how big an industry tourism is.

[notoriousjpg]

(me again)

News wise I think something like this is good: https://www.predicthq.com/ but i dont think their product is necessarily built for B2C. It's more something theyd sell to the operations centre of Uber etc. Otherwise yes i agree with you, travel news isn't really news. It's basically all some form of native advertising as the wanderlust-y articles are usually surrounded by flight deals and resort packages.

In terms of destination content for people planning travel, one stream of thought we'd have whilst working on Cluey is:

Right now travel is very supply side driven. Millions of travelers arrive in Destination X but the local tourism operators largely sell safe, common denominator stuff. They don't have visibility of what the actual Demand is, and the operators themselves become generalists.

Right now no platform can justify collecting your travel related personal information/preferences, because none of them can do anything with it. I think Cluey can (hopefully) justify asking for that information. In turn we hope that allows us to connect travelers with locals who are compatible with what you're looking for. That hopefully will remove the weeks of research needed to plan a trip, and lead to more diverse experiences in more destinations.

Our thinking is still crystallizing but those are some of the ideas we're playing around with...