I’m back in Budapest now and finally have a minute to share my “illuminations” from the Travolution Summit in London. Clearly I need to take some lessons from Ginny and Mark on writing SEO friendly titles for my blog. Before launching into my highlights I owe a big thanks to Kevin May and his team from Travolution for putting on a great show (and offering a poor startup a generous discount). My highlights:

HomeAway: Online travel seems a little obsessed with growing vertically, which made Brian Sharples’ presentation about HomeAway’s horizontal growth very interesting. Diplomacy kudos to Brian for not taking the bait on CheapFlights’ repeated mentions of their “organic growth” as if to say raising hundreds of millions in VC money were somehow cheating.

Frommers Unlimited: 85% of potential travelers search online before deciding where to go. This is great news for Joobili and other sites trying to fill a void in online travel inspiration. Go to nearly any travel website and the first thing you need to do is enter your destination. What if 85% of us don’t know where we want to go, we need some inspiration?

Google: Travelers average 12 search occasions on 22 different sites over a span of 29 days before booking their holiday. No matter how much I trust a travel site’s content or consumer reviews, I still find myself double-checking my results against a handful of other sites. The on-stop-shop for all things travel is an online Xanadu.

Dopplr: CEO Marko Ahtisaari was not a keynote speaker, but he stole the show with some precision insights. As a Dopplr user I was not surprised when he suggested “user interface is the new marketing” and “innovate by subtracting rather than adding”. Great advice that sounds obvious, but requires a lot of discipline. On a personal note, it looks likely Joobili will partner with Dopplr in the coming months to offer event and festival inspirations matching the exact travel dates of Dopplr member itineraries.

London Day 2

We also used our trip to London to meet with some more potential investors including Eden Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, and Brent Hoberman of lastminute and mydeco fame along with the manager of his new fund, Rogan Angelini-Hurll. I won’t disclose too much about the meetings, but I will say that everyone we met with was incredibly cool and generous with their advice and network of contacts. There is a perception of VCs as sharks preying on naive young founders, and I’m sure those guys exist, but we haven’t met them yet.