Ever wondered on how our normal travel searches could be made more intelligent? Imagine you want to fly from Delhi to Dubai. You get onto your travel portal, give in the from & to cities, dates for travel, select your class and then press search (more clicks and selections if it was an advanced search)
Now is this something that could be done with some intelligence built into it? How about having an IVR system integrated to your portal that picks up your requests, processes and then shoot off the results to you?
Can we have a system that brings in the combined results of Flights, Hotels and cars together so that the user does not need to spend time on searching for each of them independently and then try to see if they can be matched together etc?
Check this out
http://siri.com/
Now that could be a great step forward in building Intelligence to Travel technology but it shows were we are heading to.
One of the projects that we are working on is for a US client – Triptility, who will come out with an application that will work on a calendar based online travel engine. You can enter your meeting schedules into your calendar (Outlook, iCal, Google etc) and the app will import the schedules from the calendar, look online for the results and bring you options with Flights, Hotels and Cars included. You can set rules like – if it is a segment with less than 2 hrs flying time, I will drive, I don’t want to leave home before 6 PM on xx date and I want to return back by 10 Am on Y date.
The app will keep all those rules in mind and do the search and bring back the results for you and that too within a budget that you had already set. Now isn’t that cool?
I am sure there are many other interesting applications being developed across the world now and it would be sensible to understand that not many may survive in the market.
However it is a great start and building intelligence into Travel portals is certainly the way to go.
Author: Alex Augustine
Alex is the Managing Director of Teknokraaft.