Kukunu is a social travel planning service that puts you, your fellow travelers and your friends in the driver’s seat when it comes to planning your vacation(s). The company, which was one of the winners of Seedcamp Week 2009, has been operating quietly so far, having launched a private beta version at Le Web 2009.
Kukunu is now available in public beta, and the fledgling company has also announced that they’ve raised $400,000 from Seedcamp, Jaina Capital (the fund of Meetic founder and angel investor Marc Simoncini) and Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel).
Basically, Kukunu helps people build their itinerary across cities before planning other aspects of trips, such as booking hotels, making restaurant reservations and checking out which landmarks are worth visiting along the way.
Kukunu is dubbed a collaborative experience, as it allows for co-travelers to work together for trip-planning purposes, and also enables people to tap the wisdom of their friends via Twitter and Facebook to get more recommendations on what to do and visit.
The startup has teamed up with companies like Booking.com, Expedia, Opentable and Viator to enable users to directly access more than 100,000 hotels and 200,000 activities, restaurants and sights. One competitor that immediately springs to mind is YourTour (and I’m sure there are lots of others).
Kukunu was founded by CEO Itamar Lesuisse, a former consultant at The Boston Consulting Group and product manager at Amazon and Visa, and CTO Gerald Goldstein.
I’ve been playing with it for a while now, it is just great. Will definitely use it for my next trip if I can manage some days off
A big wow to the team !
Congrats guys !
G
looks nice… lemme give them a try…
Looks good and I like the name – congrats and best of luck to the team!
When someone has found a secret spot on BackpackerSecrets.com staright to Kukunu to plan the trip
http://www.backpackersecrets.com
bravo itamar, good luck!
Ouriel
Thanks Ouriel
i have a site for insurance
http://www.holidayworkinginsurance.com/
This is great. It’s well put together and solves a very real issue around travel planning.
The only thing that I think is missing is the ability to pool or collect travel funds in one pot from multiple friends/family.
That would make life much easier and even better if linked to group purchasing discounts.
Only a thought. I love it though.
Huw: I love the travel funds pot idea, we’d love to implement that. We need more resources to work on all these great features so if you know a great PHP developer in London, let me know. (http://uk.crunchboard.com/opening/detailjob.php?jid=7848)