I was wondering if anyone here has any experience of running a travel website such as online booking of air/train tickets and Hotels etc. and can share with me as to what is scope of such websites? How much do they cost to start? How much work & $ are required to take off? What are pitfalls and do they make quite a bit of money or likely to in future?
Starting cost is not a big issue. But getting traffic is main issue. Today 'travel' is very hot property in web and competition is very tough. If you get huge traffic on your website that is extremely good for you.
May be you can attract customers with real stories from people who have been here or there? Nowadays real stories with great photos work very well. So, you could add official information to your site (about hotels/places/airlines, etc) as well as create a forum where people could share their real stories. Building a platform is not the most expensive part here, SEO would be a question.