New Travel Planning Tools

Amadeus won the Innovators Award at the recent PCW Innovation Summit. So I thought I would also look at some other possible invocations in planning.

I like Yapta's tools for sliding the nuance of travel request. I love Skyscanner's month display - even though they have hidden it where as it used to be so easy to get to.

The vast majority of the world doesn't have English as the native language. I can tell you that there are certain countries where the adoption of English as the second language is sorely tested. Thus the assumption that English is the universal lingua franca is flawed. So are there any tools to help this work?

For some time - Google has had the "free" service of Google translate. Now it has become mainstream. I didn't notice it until I started to surf from a foreign entry point (I have been in several markets where Google's home language is not English) and it works quite well so my friends tell me.

I did a search and came up with this little article from WebNews that points out the possible challenge that Bing Travel will have with Google's Translate features.

There is good news and bad here.

First the bad news. There will be a lot of these tools emerging in recent time. And this could not happen too soon as the consumer loses patience with the current version 1.0 travel planning tools. But there is little consistency and it still requires a lot of customer explicit interaction. What I would like to see is the more lean back type of solution as espoused by Google's translate. IE where the amount of work to be done is less and you dont have to overly involve yourself in the process. Further bad news is that the tools at the back are still sorely lacking.

The good news? These are coming. As soon as someone effectively cracks the L2B problem then we can see a better solution for everything.

Watch out people in the middle - if you dont wise up then you will be toast.

Perhaps this is why Amadeus is investing so much money in these new tools.

Cheers