Threadless for Travel: "Tourless"

Threadless is a t-shirt company that has figured out a way to eliminate the biggest risk in fashion-- that customers won't accept your latest offerings. They do this by using the community to decide what they make-- designers can submit t-shirt designs, and the community rates, reviews, and comments what is submitted. The highest rating is "I'd buy this." Threadless prints the designs with the best ratings-- they get great innovative designs for cheap, and always have list of waiting buyers for their newest products. And most of all, customers feel like participants in the process and have tremendous loyalty.

It's a fantastic model, and I think it applies to markets other than t-shirts. The question is what other business can adopt a "threadless-like" business model to overcome the risk of customer acceptance as they design their offerings?

Here's one idea, I'll try to post more in the future:

I think that small group tour operations could be one of those markets. The traditional group travel business is broken. Lots of sub-scale tour operators research and put together trips to offer not knowing which ones will generate no interest and which ones will be over-subscribed. So they play to the lowest common denominator with big bus and cruise ship type tours. Consumers would love to have a say in how these offerings are designed-- demand for travel has a very "long tail" due to the diversity of travel interests and styles, and there's lots of latent demand for the convenience of group travel without the "one-size fits all" offerings of the big operators.

What would a group travel without the traditional tour operator look like? Call it "Tour-less". Amateur "trip designers" would put together trip proposals and post them to Tourless. Travelers would rate, review, and comment on what is submitted, and the designers could respond to this feedback. The highest customer rating would be "I'd go on this trip." When you sign up, people can see kind of traveler you are and whether they also want to come alone (eliminating another huge issue with traditional group travel!). When enough people sign up, only then does the trip becomes a reality (the trip designer would get a commission or a free trip). Tourless gets to book all the flights, the hotels, the tours, sell them supplies, services etc…. All the things that a traditional tour operator does, but without any of the expense or risk of putting together your own trips.

It's a tour model that scales to serve the latent demand in the long tail of demand for travel. And best of all, these would be the sort of group trips that I'd go on!