Very Almost There: A Brief Preview..

..as we near the end of development and head towards launch of the Offer Me aTrip pilot.

When we began development of Offer Me aTrip, we wrote a number of challenges on the board, each of which had to be solved to make our new approach to on-line travel viable.

Here’s a list of those challenges, together with our approach to solving them together with a few preview images from the development shop:

1. Offer Holiday Solutions, not Just Components

You can find deals for all things travel on the web, but putting together a complete holiday takes time: holidays are complex products with many different options and configurations.

Therefore we’ve tailored Offer Me aTrip for each type of holiday, ensuring that we ask customers the right questions to fully understand their travel needs.

Since a Travel Agent would ask a cruise holiday customer and a ski holiday customer a completely different set of question, so does Offer Me aTrip..

2. Use the internet to improve the travel buying communication process

Whilst the web has transformed communication, challenges often remain when two people are not face to face.

However..

By building some intelligence into the process  we believe we can get the fastest and most concise set of holiday wishes possible, with maximum convenience and minimum time spent.

Of course, getting this right involves lots of ‘play-testing’ to ensure that we ask not just the questions that the designer thinks we should ask, but also the questions that the customer wants to answer – with the information that the agent needs. That’s what we are doing right now!

3. Make Offer Me aTrip a joy for agents

Putting together the perfect holiday package and explaining why it is perfect for a given customer can be time consuming.

That’s why we’ve been putting effort into the agent process, ensuring that packages can be described quickly, colourfully and efficiently, saving agent time and maximising customer satisfaction.

Ensuring maximum re-use of information, providing tools to automagically find relevant images and trying to make the agent’s life easier is our goal.

4. Make something special and unique for customers

We wanted to provide something reminiscent of the good old days when people enjoyed selecting holidays (before the process required several days of on-line searches).

Offer Me aTrip presents holiday offers to customers as a tailor made web-brochure which can be emailed, printed and shared on-line to help enrichen the holiday decision process.

Final Thoughts

Obviously such goals are easier stated than fulfilled, although it is our aim to get as close as possible on the first attempt, and to keep working towards meeting and exceeding them.

Admittedly that first try is taking just a little longer than originally expected, but bear with us – we’ll have it out of the door soon! Expect to hear from us with a launch close to the end of January.

And then we’ll start posting our plans for version 2 soon after!