Zicasso launches!

Welcome! After almost two years of hard work, we are truly excited to announce that Zicasso is finally here to fill a gap in online tri p planning and booking: To make the experience both personalized and hassle-free. That is the core of what we do, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Let me first share some background of how we got here. My co-founder, Yuchun Ku (also my wife), and I share travel as our common passion. I’ve been to 38 countries and she’s been to 45. Throughout our travels, we found that when it comes to taking a simple trip, say we’re going from San Francisco to London and just need one flight and one hotel, we can book them quite easily online. However, for anything more complex—say we’re planning a two-week trip to visit various places in India or Peru or Spain—it can often take us over 40 hours to plan and book things online. On top of that, we couldn’t book many of the needed services online. Like tour guides, or if we needed train or bus or ferry tickets, or if we wanted to make sure we have tickets to a popular water puppet show in Vietnam….

So, to book what we couldn’t online, we would look to tour operators or travel agents to help us. But then, it would still take us a lot of time to figure out who’s a good tour operator or travel agent for that destination – those who really know that country and have local knowledge/expertise to help us out. We would also call or email two or three of them to get some comparisons on itineraries and prices, and that would also take us a lot of time.

As it turns out, many of our friends also faced similar issues. So we figured: Why not have travelers describe what they want for a trip, and have really good tour operators or travel agents submit itinerary bids? The itinerary bids should come from carefully screened travel companies with expertise in that destination, so the traveler doesn’t have to do the homework of figuring out who’s a good company to work with. Thus, Zicasso was born!

To date, Zicasso has spent thousands of hours to pre-screen and select a network of over 100 quality travel companies. They come from 40 different countries and serve over 110 destination countries.

As part of our launch, I’ve been talking to a number of reporters about Zicasso’s unique approach and have been fortunate to receive very favorable reviews. The news is starting to roll out, with great articles thus far from technology, business, and travel news websites/blogs—check them out at TechCrunch, Ars Technica, San Jose Business Journal, Profy, AOL’s WalletPop, Janted, Travel Weekly, etc. We really appreciate the overwhelming response—traffic is really starting to crank up, and certainly many more visitors than expected are filling out Trip Requests!

Thank you for all your interest. Your feedback is important for us. Feel free to comment on this blog post or send us feedback via the Contact Zicasso form. Happy Travels!

----------------------------------

April 25, 2008 update:

We are featured in the May issue of Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine! We're also listed in BudgetTravel's Online Resource Guide.