cost4travel aims at becoming the online reference source of any travel-related cost information.

cost4travel provides a way for travelers everywhere to record and reference their travel costs and experiences online, so that other travelers can budget realistically for their upcoming trips.

By combining in one website a set of travel management applications, a "social" search engine, a travelers network, cost4travel will help travelers become wiser about their travel costs.

cost4travel will launch a range of Market Data Services for the travel industry. With this data, travel companies will be able to optimise their marketing, pricing and revenue management policies by having valuable insights on travelers' price and product expectations.

 For every cost data uploaded by travelers, cost4travel will create a record, aggregate them, and market them to airlines, hotel groups, car rental companies, tour operators and online travel players.

cost4travel's competitive advantage relies on the fact that:

1. its founder has spent more 12 years in the leading global travel distribution company, where he acquired not only a strong knowledge of the travel data market, but also a wide network of contacts in the industry;

2.  he has dedicated the last 12 months on the venture, allowing him to validate the concept with travel organizations and with a number of travel journalists and bloggers, and develop a first prototype.

Stéphane Pingaud, cost4travel's founder, spent 12 years at the head office of the Amadeus IT Group, a global supplier of IT and distribution solutions for the travel industry. During these 12 years, he developed a deep understanding of the travel distribution and how travel organisations, more specifically airlines, use technology and information to improve their proposition to a multitude of customer segments.

In his role as head of marketing, Stéphane launched two initiatives that changed significantly the airline distribution landscape:

1. The value-based pricing concept, a new way to price distribution services to airlines, based on the value of the point of sales to the airline; this concept was subsequently applied by all competitors

2. The airline retailing concept, a new range of distribution solutions to better merchandise the airline product through travel agency reservation systems. Again, a number of competitors followed suit with their own airline merchandising proposition