I love the idea. I've considered this idea many times.
In terms of execution: the formfields should be on top of the page. Put the "your email" field at the bottom. You want people to start thinking about what to enter in those fields. You need to put less text on the homepage, or lay it out better visually so it doesn't feel so much as a wall of text.
For SEO: you could start publishing recommendations/tips (after they were paid for) on aggregated pages too, to get people to link to those, and to show what your value is before people actually use you.
Thanks, I put so much text to try to explain the idea and credentials as to not seem like one of "You give me money and I give you this awesome secret to saving and becoming a millionaire in a year" but I agree it is a bit too much.
This pretty much sums it up: "Tell us where you want to go and experienced travelers will provide you with info you cannot find on search websites."
You can probably rewrite a lot of that homepage, make it shorter and convert better.
I like the "Got an awesome deal? we'll find you a better one for $10" approach. ie: encourage people to find the best deal they can find on expedia etc, then get them a better deal. One way of doing it would be to take that approach and build your homepage around that (instead of just making it a sentence in between other sentences). I would imagine that would convert very well.
I was primarily inspired by this Derek Sivers blog post http://sivers.org/semi-expert and my own frustration when often booking flights and finding from a friend that I could have saved tons of money by using a low cost airline that is not on search engines.
- your value proposition is in the "it's XXX but you can get there for YYY". Put that front and center and give it a better visual treatment than the insufficiently anti-aliased black sans ;)
- the $10 sleeve makes you think hard where it's at right now. Move everything related to $10 only in one spot. The entire copy under "EXPERIENCED TRAVELERS HELP YOU SAVE TIME AND MONEY" could be compressed to a couple bullet points.
- "How do we do it" doesn't need to be on the front page - it distract from the goal of getting me to try
Nice design and excellent idea. Just one reservation: the words Human Powered and Search dont tend to go well together, you may want to change the tag line.
In terms of execution: the formfields should be on top of the page. Put the "your email" field at the bottom. You want people to start thinking about what to enter in those fields. You need to put less text on the homepage, or lay it out better visually so it doesn't feel so much as a wall of text.
For SEO: you could start publishing recommendations/tips (after they were paid for) on aggregated pages too, to get people to link to those, and to show what your value is before people actually use you.