Plan a Trip in a Single Search with Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner
For most people, trip planning begins with a search box. But a single search is just the start of what often becomes hours, even months of intensive online searching, sharing with friends, planning, and logistical details. What if, instead of having to do all your own research on ‘Paris hotels’ and ‘wine tasting in France,’ you could enter a single search and get a fully formed trip, courtesy of a fellow traveler, back? Even better, one that you could use to help plan your own trip’copying and changing it to fit your needs?
That’s the idea behind Trip Planner, now available in beta on Yahoo! Travel. It is part of our continuing effort to help people find, use, share and expand upon the knowledge on the Web.
Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community.
You can already search for some pretty interesting trips by description, author, tags, and more, whether you’re a foodie visiting San Francisco or a newlywed headed for Seychelles. And because the people creating these trips are the millions of Yahoo! users in our network’there could potentially be as many types of trips as there are types of travelers.
Here’s an example of a search for ‘San Francisco’:
Try out Trip Planner and let us know what you think!
Katherine Tom
Yahoo! Travel Editor
Cool if you can save drafts of trip itinary, and if ratings – a la tripadvisor.com – could be included … perhaps even with a filter so you could get ratings only from people you trust/know? Nice to have a feature – “if you like this, you may also like this” Another feature would be if you only have 5 days, or 10 days…built-in suggestions based on preferences.
Very cool, can’t wait to see this when the full version launches! One of the more exciting products from Yahoo! recently…
Scott – I definitely agree with you!
The idea of being able to search for fully-formed trip itineraries, then be able to copy and change them as you see fit is an intriguing one. Using a specialized and well-designed web interface to help a person plan their trip is a good idea to begin with. Augment that with the social aspects of sharing on the web, simply brilliant! At least, we at TripTie think so….
Quite a few months back, we had a very similar inspiration. Honestly, it was brought about by a disdain for planning travel: not only doing research on the web (for places to go to in Japan), but trying to whittle down options from our numerous guidebooks, pamphlets, and but of course, TripAdvisor. From that day forth, we set out to build something to aid the travel planners just like us. At the time, there was nothing of its kind….now, there is Yahoo Trip Planner. Soon, there will be TripTie.
i’d love to have a way to inlcude that “matching trips” on other sites… or something like “My Recommended Trips”.
I mean, i could create a “Buenos Aires Trip” and recommend it on my blog… which i think it could be more cool than the plan someone who’ve never been in my cite before.
Great feedback guys! Robin, you can save a draft of your trip currently, simply keep your trip Private (this is the default) as you build your trip. When you’re ready to share it with other people, go into the sharing settings and change your trip to Shared (only your friends can see/edit your trip) and/or Public (everyone can view your trip, but only friends can edit). User ratings also appear in Trip Planner.
We definitely want to create tools to help people find the trips that best match their interests, whether through recommendations, tagging, etc. Right now, our liquidity is a little low for these types of features, so you know what to do to help us get there–plan a trip! :)
I bumped into Yahoo Trip Planner two weeks ago, and started planning an outing, but then couldn’t find a way to connect to reservation services through this interface.
Did I miss an interface element somewhere, or is this more for talking about a trip than actually making the trip happen…?
Great feedback! John Dowdell, we are currently working on integrating booking option into tripplanner.
The biggest problem I have with “trip planners” is that most are really just point to point direction generators. For example, I need to travel from Redlands, CA to Austin, TX. What I really need in a trip planning website is the ability to specify that I only want to drive 7-9 hours a day. Without that, I have to spend hours trying to find what city I *would* reach in that timeframe, set a stop, look for hotels, and repeat until I get to my destination. Any help on this front?