It’s Official: PlanetEye has Launched!

Since I joined PlanetEye a year ago, it has been fascinating to see how the company has evolved, taken new and exciting directions, and started to establish itself as a vibrant player in the online travel planning market.

In the process, PlanetEye has gone from a ultra-private beta involving the help of friends and family to a private beta to a public beta. Today, we’re excited to announce the official launch of PlanetEye as a one-stop destination for all your travel planning needs. (As you can see, I’m becoming more of a marketing person and less of a journalist every day!)

The cornerstone of the new and improved PlanetEye is a feature called the Travel Pack, which lets travelers “clip” the interesting photographs, attractions, hotels and restaurants discovered on PlanetEye when they are planning a trip or simply putting together travel ideas. It like the manila folder really organized people like my mother use to collect newspaper and magazine articles.

What’s great about the Travel Pack is the more you add to it, the better feel you get for your trip because you can easily and quickly get a sense of where everything is located by looking at a personal map that shows what you’ve clipped.

It means, for example, that if you’ve select a number of restaurants and attractions in the same area, it’s easy to book a nearby hotel where you can walk to everything. This is something I could have really used a few years ago when trying to arrange a trip to Paris.

Not only can you research and plan your trip on PlanetEye but you can book as well. We’ve got an affiliate agreement with Travelocity.com so you can book hotels now – with car rentals and airline flights coming soon – on PlanetEye.

We’ve also got partnerships so you can make restaurant reservations (OpenTable), buy tickets to events and attractions (StubHub) and book a spa appointment (WaySpa) – all on PlanetEye.

PlanetEye also features extensive travel content. We now have “Local Experts” in 50 cities around the world providing a local’s perspective on what to do and eat, and where to stay. This is a project that I’ve been working on for the past 10 months so it’s really exciting to see a global team writing really terrific content. We’re also aggregating a growing number of professional sources, which you can use to seed your Travel Pack.

All in all, it has been an amazing year for PlanetEye and myself. Given what we’ve got in the works, there’s more excitement on the near horizon. Come check us out. As a sweetener, we’re running a contest: everyone who registers is eligible to win a $2,000 travel voucher.

More: There’s already been some terrific coverage of our launch, including Mashable, StartupNorth and VentureBeat.

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