New trip planning tool from Travelocity
October 30, 2007
Travelocity has launched their latest tool to help customers plan their perfect holiday. The latest addition (I blogged about one of their others here) to the stable of user friendly trip planning tools is the Road Trip Wizard.
The Road Trip Wizard is aimed at users seeking a way to build up a road trip itinerary online. It’s much closer to the kind of trip planning tools I’ve always thought were the next logical step for the online travel arena (more on that in a post coming soon). It’s really flexible, allows multi destination plans to be made and is a definite move away from the normal route of having to specify dates and destinations before getting any results (or even content in some cases) back from the website your querying. This is a very good thing! It’s actually fairly unintuitive for users to be asked such specifics when they first hit a website. Imagine the scenario of the travel agents, never are the first questions you’re asked ‘what date, how long, where, how many people’, it’s more likely to be ‘what kind of holiday, what kind of weather, what kind of experience’ this is where we need to get to in online.
The wizard allows you to select a starting point and then search around it for places to stay and things to do (and you can of course book them), then you can select a next point for your journey and do the same again. It will then plot a route on a map and warn you if it thinks you’re driving too far in a day etc. You can specify more details about yourself and the party, even down to the reason for the trip, and it gets even more clever based on the personas you’ve created. The intelligent engine behind the wizard scours a database of over 5 million points of interest making it extremely powerful.
At the end of it all you have a very detailed plan of where to stay, what to do and the driving directions to get you from point to point.
The Road Trip Wizard is a piece of technology created by a company called LeisureLogix, Travelocity is the first to launch an application using the platform. There are obvious aplications for UK tour operators as well, it could quite nicely be applied to the (currently very popular) flydrive holidays that are often sold to the east and west coast U.S. This would allow a UK tour operator to sell a flight into Orlando for instance and then allow a user to book a car and a range of hotels across the country, flying back via a west coast airport such as San Francisco. Integrating this technology with a dynamic packaging engine would be incredibly powerful! I’d also like to see it ported over to cover South Africa as well, it would be a great way to plan a Garden Route road trip. Tools like this are a definite step in the right direction for online travel.
Inspirator or Inspiroscope?
October 16, 2007
I got a bit confused when I hit the Expedia homepage this morning…
I don’t visit Expedia very often, I usually find better prices elsewhere and book my flights on industry rates so don’t find a great deal of use for the online travel agent. However, it is a great site and one which all in online travel could learn something from. They merchandise products like no-one else and have some great usability features that make it easy to find good prices and products.
Over a year ago they built the Inspirator, a tool which allowed users a more human friendly way to get some inspiration into their holiday research process. It allowed users to choose two themes (eg. romantic, beaches, nightlife) and then choose a desired type of weather (warm, hot or ‘I don’t mind) and then how far they want to fly and where from. The Inspirator then presents the user with some information on matching destinations along with some relevant offers. It’s not the most inspiring piece of functionality and anyone with a good command of a Google search will find they can research better there, but for the majority of web users it serves a good purpose.
Now, Expedia have launched another take on this kind of guided navigation/research, the Inspiroscope. The Inspiroscope is similar but it’s basically a homage to Web 2.0, travel style. This is essentially a tag cloud presented in Flash format which users can click on a word from and be presented with five matching destinations. It works, it looks quite nice and again, for someone not proficient in using the internet or really inexperienced at travel it’s probably fine. But for anyone more experienced it’s really limiting! Google presents far better results if you have any skill in web searching at all, or maybe try Tripadvisor…
Maybe I’m being a little harsh, theses types of functionality serve a purpose for Expedia. They’re more engaging than a normal availability search, provide insight into destinations and are a value add for users. They also provide opportunities to build the brand and engage users while acquiring new CRM opportunities. So it’s not all bad!
They could be done better though! For example, merge this functionality with Opodo’s Escape Map and you make it even more engaging, allow users to explore as well as guiding them and you will engage them further. Link the results to Google Earth to allow users to view the area more closely. Allow users to add in restrictions on price & dates and they become much more valuable. Integrate hotel ratings and allow the process to proceed beyond the destinations to the selection of a property and you will really turn these tools into conversion enhancers (rather than just nice features).
As an aside, it’s been brought to my attention that Expedia and Opodo have left some of this functionality rather open. Expedia have left access open to an XML file which contains all the tag words in their Inspiroscope and also contains the number of votes for each word. Great if you want to get an idea of how to tag your own content… Opodo meanwhile have left a backdoor in their Escape Map which allows users to pass a query string which will return XML data of the offers that can be displayed on the map. Great for anybody wanting to scrape a load of offers from their site (or compare prices)…
Edit: To link to Alex Bainbridge’s original article…
Web 2.0 investment rising
September 17, 2007
This study has been released showing the amount invested in Web 2.0 properties this year so far.
Here’s some highlights via E-Consultancy:
- $464.4m was invested into 101 Web 2.0 deals in the six months, with $357m (£179m) going into 67 US deals, a similar figure to the same period in 2006.
- $52m (£26m) was invested in 20 European Web 2.0 deals, the same number of deals as for the whole of last year.
- The UK accounted for seven of the European deals and an investment of $22m (£11m). In 2006, five Web 2.0 deals involved UK companies, worth a total of $23.4m (£11.9m).
- Investment in French companies has also increased, with five deals worth $16m (£8m) so far this year. Last year a total of $39m (£20m) was invested in France.
- Investment in China seems to have dropped slightly, just nine Web 2.0 deals, worth a total of $41m (£20.5m) down from 12 deals during the same time last year.
The one question that remains to be asked is quite how they categorise these deals as Web 2.0? On investigation quite a few don’t share any of the common web 2.0 criteria. Also, if this is Web 2.0 deals, what about VC deals with other web apps and companies? I’m sure the figures for that would bump this up to a much higher amount of investment than last year. Maybe it’s time to stop segregating the web into 1.0 and 2.0. At the end of the day it’s all web based sites, services and applications. Applying a label of 2.0 to some of them may end up being detrimental to the rest or at the very least confusing to the VC’s who don’t really understand the technical ramifications.
5000 web apps in the blink of an eye
August 29, 2007
All your favourite web 2.0 apps flashing before your eyes… Like saucepan sets.
Google releases embedded maps
August 21, 2007
Tired of having to code an API to get a Google map into your web page? Well now you don’t have to (at least for a basic map).
Google have announced the release of the widely anticipated embed feature for their maps tool. It’s really easy to use and means anyone with a business can now put a location map on their site. Here’s my example below of the places I stayed in Cuba earlier this year, took a whole 5 minutes to create and embed.
Innovation in travel online
August 16, 2007
Is quite a rare thing. Usually the innovations that we see in travel websites is fairly conservative and not really pushing the boundaries of what is possible online. Take Opodo’s new EscapeMapTM for instance, while extremely useful it’s hardly groundbreaking and far more sophisticated mash-ups have been produced for other industries by kids working on their home PC’s.
Online travel is such a massive vertical on the web that it always amazes me that we’re not at the cutting edge of web production and innovation. From a booking point of view of course we are fairly sophisticated, and yes travel companies are early adopters of Web 2.0 and social networking ideas, but they rarely deliver all that much value and are often just to prove they can do it (basically gratuitous).
However, STA Travel are storming ahead with their new set of widgets which are an excellent addition to their really rather good website. The widgets are available for PC, Mac dashboard, Google desktop and even Facebook. And they’re really useful and compelling little tools that fit with their target demographic very well.
Good work STA Travel! Now come on all you tour operators and online travel agents, let’s see something a little more innovative than a Google Earth layer!
Eric Schmidt’s take on Web 3.0
August 13, 2007
There’s a lot of talk about Web 3.0 and what exactly that may mean for the online industry. Here’s a take on it from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Succinct and to the point, it gets my vote. Although he has completely missed the idea of semantic web out which has got to be one of the concepts that leads the way as we move to Web 3.0.
Food for thought though; but I still stick to my adage that we’re actually only in Web 1.1 at the moment and the next evolution will still only be scratching the surface of whats possible!
Top 10 Dot Coms to Watch
July 30, 2007
The Guardian has published an interesting list and insight into what they pitch as the top ten dot coms to watch. They’re all great companies who’ve been included and I’d find it hard to disagree with any of them being featured although there are some other start-ups that deserve to be featured too. So maybe a top ten is a bit short and a top twenty would have been better to include the other rising stars.
The list is as follows:
- Dopplr
Social networking for frequent travellers. - Extate
Intelligent search of property websites. - Garlik
Online identity management. - MindCandy
Alternate reality gaming. - Moo
Print on demand: cards, notes and stickers. - OnOneMap
Map-based property search. - Touch Local
Local directory services. - Trusted Places
User-created local information. - Zopa
Peer to peer lending. - Zubka
Recruitment 2.0.
Bloggers cashing in
July 17, 2007
Details in Business Week here about how much the top bloggers are raking in from their online antics.
Unsurprising list of people but the amounts are quite staggering. Some bloggers are refuting the claims but it’s probably pretty accurate judging by the traffic levels that they claim…
Good on them. However, it does of course make those of us who do it for nothing that much more honourable 
