Sharing your travel experience @ Minube.com

This Monday we talked to Pedro Jareño from Minube.com, a website that explores the social aspects of travelling and that believes that a trip doesn't begin with planning but has to take the inspiration and sharing experience into consideration.

Pedro compared Minube with other travel websites such as TripAdvisor, where indeed you don't see people talking about the places they've been and liked and the first thing you see are the tools to get your flight and hotel. Moreover, he said that nowadays is all about conversations and you're most likely to trust a recommendation from a friend rather than from a travel agency. Well, I agree that most of my last trips were extremely influenced by what others have said to me.

He commented about the business model, saying that revenues come basically from three streams: contracts with government tourism offices; commissions for sending leads to other sites such as hotel and flight booking; and most recently contracts with the private sector in promoting hotels, apartments, restaurants, etc. Relating to the expansion to Brazil I wonder what they plan to emphasize there since given the World Cup, getting money from the government right now is a tough thing to achieve.

The guys at Minube strongly believe in the importance of their content to differentiate themselves. With a small but growing team of 20 people they have a community manager that helps to make sure that the content provided by users has good quality and that's key since users generate great part of it. Talking more about content Pedro mentioned about how interested they are in having a tool that can bring content from users social networks to Minube that can add to the content they already have.

I found the concept really interesting and I couldn't resist to post a destination that I really like to visit in my city when I'm there: Parque Estadual da Cantareira. It really adds value when you can get tips from people who have been in the place before. They're really different from the kind of thing you'd get from a travel agency since most travellers have no incentives to support their opinions, they just say what they think. In the end I think websites where you get price quotations are all the same, actually even the quotations are the same everywhere, and the content like you get in Minube was mostly in travel forums only, in my opinion they had a great insight in putting things together.