Booking flights and hotels online is easy, but what about planning your daily itinerary once you arrive at your destination? Peek, a San Francisco start-up that opens to the public Thursday, tries to help with that.
Peek is for discovering and booking vacation activities. To start, it covers California and Hawaii, but plans to expand soon to other destinations in the United States, then Mexico, Europe and elsewhere.
“It is intended to be comprehensive, so you can forget about looking at magazines and guidebooks,†said Ruzwana Bashir, Peek's co-founder and chief executive. “We are fixing a piece of the market that is very large.â€
Ms. Bashir came up with the idea for Peek after planning a trip to Istanbul with friends, and having a typically difficult time finding things to do. After reading guidebooks and magazines and searching a couple dozen Web sites, she had to call local businesses to make reservations or buy tickets because they were not avai lable online.
Exploring Peek feels a bit like flipping through a travel magazine. There are big, beautiful photographs - if Peek is not happy with those that the businesses provide themselves, they find others or send photographers to take new ones - and the layout is clean, with short, informative descriptions. It pulls reviews from sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Fodor's. Peek users can also write reviews.
The activities vary from mainstream, like Disneyland, to obscure, like a wine blending lesson near Napa. There are free activities, like a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, but most are paid, from museum tickets to hot-air balloon rides.
Peek has partnerships with these businesses, and keeps a hefty portion of the ticket price, between 15 and 30 percent. For small businesses that do not have online booking or even Web sites, Peek offers them those services. Because tourists spend an average $200 per person per day in a place like Hawaii, Ms. Bashir s aid, and usually buy more than one ticket for activities, Peek's commissions add up.
The site caters to women, Ms. Bashir said, because they do the majority of travel planning, and offers activities aimed at relatively affluent people in their 30s and 40s.
People can sort activities by interest - like food, family or adventure - and well-known local people describe their ideal days. Piers Morgan, the TV host, offers his favorite activities in San Diego (he likes kayaking and Mexican food); Jack Dorsey, the Twitter and Square co-founder, shares a tour of San Francisco; and Tory Burch, the clothing designer, describes an ideal day on Oahu.
Travel is an area that many Web companies, including big ones like Google and Microsoft, are trying to tackle. Peek has raised $1.4 million from angel investors. A few other sites offer vacation activities, including Expedia, Viator and Vayable, though the first two are very broad and a bit cluttered, and the last includes only niche activities.
