Nileguide seemed to be yet another trip-planning site when I first checked it out earlier this year. While I appreciated the ease with which trips could be planned according to the shared itinerary information from others and localized featured contributors, I was wary of the lacking open-ended search functionality that would make for a more broadly appealing user experience.
In the past month, NileGuide has not only added some new features that address all the major issues I had with NileGuide's initial launch, but the company has also raised $8 million in Series B funding, led by Austin Ventures, with Lehman Brothers Venture Partners and return investors Draper Richards and KPG Ventures also participating in the round. This brings the total amount of funding raised by NileGuide to over $9.5 million.
According to NileGuide CEO and founder Josh Steinitz, the funding will go towards new hires, building out the platform and marketing. Steinitz also mentioned that this is the largest amount of funding a user-generated trip planning site has received, outside of those travel sites that are focused on lead generation and transactions.
It was this differentiation between NileGuide and the other transaction-based services that Steinitz focused on for a portion of our conversation earlier this week, as the recommendations for users come from other users and localized editors. There are no direct ways in which to book flights, make hotel reservations, etc. This may be a downfall for some users, and perhaps it's something NileGuide may want to address in the future, but right now it seems to be rather focused on the creation of trip itineraries based on personalized recommendations.
So what about that open-ended search? With increasing site data and a few tweaks, there's now a search tab and more general recommendations present in each destination front page. There are also additional features that have been layered in as well. The option to initiate a new search still isn't available as there's no omnipresent search bar, but the other search and filter options that have been applied to NileGuide make it a bit easier to use overall.
Some other upcoming plans for NileGuide include richer user profiles, making individual users a more centralizing factor in the sharing and recommendation process. This piqued my curiosity, as I previously found no direct way in which to rate users or determine their trustworthiness. Whether these upcoming improved profiles will help out towards that end, time will tell, but there are still ways in which to see trusted users, based on the ranking of their public content.