LeWeb: Kukunu wants to be your travel agent online

[UK] Kukunu is a London based start up that aims to replace traditional travel agents. The founders Gerald Goldstein and Itamar Lesuisse wants to help people build their holidays online, with the tag-line ”travel is better when you plan it yourself”. Most reasonably tech-savvy people already know this and can find their way around all those price comparison and hotel review sites out there. However Kukunu wants to offer a broader service than their competitors and guess their way to all your travel needs.

Watch Kukunu’s pitch at 00:04:36

The travel market is worth about 80 billion euros in Europe alone and Kukunu hopes to be one of the many travel startups out there to get a share of that. The company has done their research and according to them 49 percent of travelers say planning is a major pain. And they want things to change.

Kukunu works as a trip planning tool, then as a recommendation engine and finally links into social networks, so you can share your travel plans on Twitter or Facebook.

Kukunu wants users to plan their whole itinerary with the help of their service. If you book a hotel through the site, the service looks at your other travel choices and will then try to come up with the hotel that would most likely suit your needs.

Kukunu are planning on making money through commissions on the bookings that are made through their site. The next step for the company are planning on growing their user-base and developing a mobile platform.

The company was started a couple of months ago and is launching its private beta at Le Web.