**Please note that Zissu Travel was officially changed to TravelGround in late 2009. Please see the “About Us” section for more information.**

Zissu Beta is on its way…

2009 is going to be a very exciting year for ZissuTravel! After over a year of development we are approaching the release of our first Beta-site!

Listing accommodations and establishments

As we head towards the month of February two of our members (Jono and Marcel!) are readying themselves to put the Zissu name out into the ether. In addition to their corporate duties throughout the coming year, Marcel and Jono are going to initiate personal contact with Accommodation Suppliers throughout South Africa and offer them an opportunity to be listed on South Africa’s most powerful accommodation search — For Free!! The only payment to ZissuTravel comes in the form of a 15% commission when bookings are completed.  In other words, if an establishment ever pays ZissuTravel, it’s because they are making money!

An immense task lies ahead

At ZissuTravel we have set ourselves an immense task.  We are not only going to initiate and maintain a thorough accommodation booking website that will list a multitude of well-respected accommodation suppliers and their establishments, but we are also growing what will become South Africa’s largest directory of activity guides and events promoting online tourism in an unprecedented fashion. The core nature of our website, being inspired by Web 2.0 successes such as Facebook and Wikipedia, is that it is driven by collaboration. Listed establishment pages will be easily managed by the users that supply the accommodation much in the same way that Facebook users maintain their own profiles, while activity guides and events pages will be built up through collaboration with text descriptions and pictures submitted and edited by the Zissu community as it grows.

Kick-starting collaborative activity guides

After much consideration we have realized that while one of the core differentiators of our site is the tight integration of Google Maps. This allows us to couple Activities to Hotels and visa versa in ways that none of our competitors can manage, but this phenomenal capability can only come into its own when a certain number of activities have already been defined on the map.

This simple fact has led us to one conclusion – we have to kick start the collaborative process by writing high quality, valuable content for the site. Ultimately this travel writing task will be adopted by our users, in addition to Zissu generated content, and Zissu’s major role will become quality checking and cultivating quality Wiki travel guides. The Zissu team has already written over 100 activity guides for Cape Town (our home city) and is currently writing about the rest of the Western Cape. We anticipate that this process will proceed relatively fast, and Wiki-style collaborative content will emerge quickly as our user-base grows.