As a travel writer, he’s travelled to 65 countries. One day, when organizing a trip to Thailand, he was so frustrated that Jordan Stolper thought, “There’s got to be a better way of doing this, and so I set out to solve the problem.”

The problem he was wanted to solve was “there was no good place to hold on to the travel information”.

“You could bookmark it, and that’s a mess, and then you have to print it out or take information off the Web – this is stupid. Information should be on left on the Web and allowed to flow and surprise us.”

And so Stolper started Gliider, a travel research tool that lets users gather and save travel information from any site on the web – and then get deals specific to their trip.

At the time of its launch in October 2009, Tech Crunch wrote a review of the product, “While the travel 2.0 space is nearly saturated with a plethora of competitive products, Gliider’s tool is incredibly useful and its focus is narrow (Gliider only wants to help users with planning), which could make it standout in the crowd.”

And stand out it has. It has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. It was a finalist at the 2009 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation summit and it was shortlisted for a Globe Travel Innovation Award.

Stolper told WIT, “What Gliider does is look at the content you are collecting and matches it with deals by location, date, property or similar property. It is self-directed. Because there is too much information out there, we help you organise the information and make dynamic matches.”

He calls it the “intersection between content and commerce”.

Stolper called launching a start-up “a lonely and ego-bruising affair”. He and his partner, Jared Richardson, started the business in New York in “the darkest days”, right after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

“Actually there was no better time to start a company. New York was full of laid-off developers looking for deals and willing to work. The cost of labour was good.”

It will shortly be launching an iPhone application. “With that, we will have the ability to reach travellers when they are in market,” said Stolper.

Its users number in the thousands and its top power user is a 27-year-old Toronto woman who has 18 trips being planned and 900 items of content.

Said Stolper, “The growth has been inspiring. We have good downloads, good retention, good return and repeat use. The challenge is to remain laser-focused on the problem we set out to solve.

“We are rigorous and brutal about trying to make sure that our product is world class.”

The next stage is marketing. “There is a graveyard of products that never got past the distribution stage.”

While its application isn’t geographically-specific, its deals are currently skewed towards North America which means it has limited value at the moment in Asia. “We would like to expand and do distribution deals with sites in UK, Germany, France, India, China and Singapore,” said Stolper.

Featured image credit (Business People in the Airport): Ockra/iStock