SEATTLE — If you want to fly to Paris or London for a few days, online travel booking sites like Expedia, Orbitz and others have that down pat. The process gets a little more ungainly when a traveler is planning a more complicated trip and wants to know how adding and subtracting destinations will affect price.
Consider a trip to Scandinavia. If a few days in Copenhagen is tops on your list, but you’d like to also spend a few days each in Stockholm and Helsinki at a mid-range hotel, what would that cost? What about a multicountry trip to Africa?
Normally, people would pick up the phone to call a traditional travel agent to answer questions like that.
A new start-up, Vamo, founded by a former Facebook executive, is intended to give people all the online tools they need to book those trickier trips. Vamo — as in vámonos, Spanish for “let’s go” — was introduced on Tuesday and provides people with curated trip suggestions after they provide a few basic bits of information. Tell Vamo you’re planning a nice-day trip and mention “Paris,” and it will suggest a “best of France” trip that includes Paris, the French Riviera and Provence and an “art capitals of western Europe” trip that spans Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam.
It displays estimates of per person transportation and lodging prices for the trips, adjustable based on hotel quality and travel dates. You can easily customize the trip by adding London, Brussels and Versailles as destinations, giving travelers more flexibility than they usually get from travel packages organized by tour companies.
Vamo was founded by Ari Steinberg, an early Facebook employee who eventually ended up opening the social network’s Seattle office. While he was still at Facebook, Mr. Steinberg became frustrated when planning international vacations in Africa, Europe and India. He said traditional travel booking sites required him to do a lot of research on his own.
“You can do it on these web sites but it’s really tedious and takes a lot of time,” he said.
Mr. Steinberg said he wasn’t crazy about using travel agents because he liked having more control over the booking process so he could see how modifying aspects of the trip would change its overall cost. Vamo is designed to be a marriage of the convenience of Web travel booking with the insight of a travel agent.
In its current test phase, Vamo is only offering trip planning for United States travelers going to Europe. Eventually, it will add other regions.
“We want to help you see more of the world given that you’re a busy person and you have only so many days to travel,” he said.