We really think that we have re-invented online travel planning. Go to voyavo.com to check it out.
About two and a half years ago we had the opportunity to do some consulting in Athens, Greece. We had a set budget from our customer and a time frame for work, but really didn’t want to travel across the Atlantic from the west coast of the US to just see just Athens. We decided to try some meta-search engines to see what we could come up with for other options for cities to visit before or after our visit to Athens. We instantly grew frustrated.
What we found was that there was no real way to create actionable work sheets of itineraries using any of the existing meta-engines, online travel agencies and/or travel planners. Mocking trips up was a combination of scribbling down prices, creating spreadsheets, and re-running searches for availability and pricing back on the originating site. Alternately we could store this information in a travel planner, but do nothing with it until it was time to travel. In many cases it was an after the fact travel planning process that we didn’t enjoy. In both cases, our intent was to simply mock-up some destination pricing scenarios, but we found that it wasn’t really possible.
We decided that this process was broken and that it was time to give it a shot on our own. This was a larger challenge than originally thought, as we needed it to cover both business and consumer travel planning as our original use case required. After a year of the project sitting on the shelf we finally started it back in October of 2008 and yesterday we soft launched it to the industry.
Voyavo.com is 1/4 meta-search, 1/4 travel planner, 1/4 geo-located logistics, and 1/4 collaboration.
While we know there a few usability issues that we need to over-come, we’d still love to hear your feedback.
Search, Add some items to a trip, and explore your destination.
Enjoy!
