Archives for "Progress"

..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:

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Now that the New Year is firmly upon us we owe the world a quick update on our launch progress..

As of now, the development of Offer Me aTrip is pretty much wrapped up and complete. Although we can’t wait to unleash it on the world, we are still working on a number of ‘fit & finish’ items so that we can ensure the best user experience possible.

User experience is important to us, which is the reason why we would rather launch when ready instead of rushing to market. We’ll let you know as soon as we are ready, which should be within the next 1-2 weeks.

Meanwhile, back to work…

Some early preview images: (more coming soon)

Offer Me a Trip – great travel offers, powered by amazing humans

On Monday we began searching for Travel Agents to power Offer Me a Trip. As in any new endeavour we were partly anxious about the potential response.

Had our market research been correct in identifying  a demand for the service? Had we interpreted the market’s needs in the correct way? Had we done a good enough job in communicating our offer and our advantages?

Happily for us quite a few travel agents have proven the answers to those questions to be YES, and we are well the way towards our target quota of agents for the pilot launch in January.

We’ve also been hugely encouraged by the positive comments received in the process, and we absolutely can’t wait to launch so that we can repay you all by providing some customers for your services. We are sure they will be delighted with what you can offer.

So we just wanted to say a big

Thanks!

We are planning to launch our live pilot phase in January, and we’re looking for Travel Agents to participate.

(Wondering what Offer Me aTrip is? Read our introduction)

Many websites launch with a huge bang, and quickly fade to a whimper. The search engine Cuil was one such example of a heavily hyped launch that quickly faded. Why? because it didn’t doesn’t work properly.

Although our excitement is barely containable we are resisting the temptation to shout too loudly just yet and will begin with a pilot launch of Offer Me aTrip in January.

What is a Pilot Launch

Its a different word for beta, and we are hoping that unlike “beta” pilot doesn’t suggest that it’s half finished and that things won’t work.

What we do know is that despite our very best attention, hours of testing and reams of feedback, when real life customers and agents start using Offer Me aTrip in anger they will find things that they don’t like, things that don’t work quite as expected and probably a few things seem just plain odd. We are going to be surprised by quite a few things too, but hopefully not all negative.

We’ll start by advertising on-line, sending traffic to the site and listening carefully for feedback. Depending on what we find we’ll hold off on advertising for a day or so while we make changes and repeat the process with a higher volume of traffic. The only thing we know for certain about this process is that customers and agents will be relentlessly chased for feedback and there will be the odd feeling of devastation as what we thought were really cool features turn out to be complete rubbish.

Hopefully, several weeks of this process will result in a well honed site, ready for the big launch. Standby for more information in due course.

Want to be a part of it?

If you are a Travel Agent and would like to participate in our pilot and make the world a better place then check us out and sign up at OfferMeaTrip.com/agent

The blog from Offer Me aTrip

Remember when booking your holiday was really the start of your holiday? The excitement of perusing brochures, dreaming of exciting destinations and wishing your self far away.

Along comes the Internet..

Although we love the Internet – we couldn’t live without it, and it’s provided our living for most of our careers – we don’t think it  has really delivered when it comes to travel.

Sure, its great to be able to book a flight, look at pictures of hotel rooms and research destinations in a way never possible before. But, with all this new opportunity came a lot of noise. 

Our belief is that purchasing travel on the Internet today is too time consuming, too frustrating and just not fun. Hundreds of web-sites scream for your attention, on-line ads blink at you and try together with clever search optimisation tricks to divert you to buy the travel that they want, and not the holiday that you deserve.

We want to change all of that

Offer Me aTrip will bring holidays to the consumer, not drag consumers to holidays, enabling travel to be booked without multiple searches and without the need to decode reams of sales information.

With Offer Me aTrip, the customer simply describes what they are looking for and we do the rest, delivering a limited number offers hand selected by expert agents and presented in the form of a personal online brochure.

In January 2010 we are planning to make booking a holiday the start of the holiday experience once more, and we’ll be blogging our progress here.

Thanks for reading!

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