Jon’s visual search concept
Travolution (www.travolution.com) recently published an article on BA Holidays new visual inspirational search using images the customer can drag a selection of pictures depicting various types of trip from a gallery into a virtual brochure before asking it to come up with trips to suit the choice.
As far back as January last year (2012) I was dreaming up my own concept called Visual Search in which the customer would be inspired (using personalisation) to search for holidays based on clicking inspirational pictures. Clicking the images would lead the customer to a holiday result set that they could then book. I officially launched the concept at last November’s World Travel Market to a very interested press and fellow travel trade technologists. Of course the company I was working for weren’t ready to take it forward and lo and behold we see BA Holidays now launching their inspirational search.
I have no issues with BA Holidays doing this as my concept was a lot more clever but I will launch the details of why in another post. It just shows that the travel technology market is buoyant and if you don’t lead then others will. I have many other concepts ready to launch but I will now wait until I have a team behind me who want to deliver it. if anyone out there is interested on my take on inspirational search please contact me through this blog or email me here
Original article in which I am quoted can be found here: http://www.travolution.com/articles/2013/07/31/6958/ba-holidays-sets-out-to-inspire-with-visual-search-feature.html
Original launch articles:
tnooz – Comtec takes search down the visual route
travolution – Comtec combines social and mobile in new visual search technology
Musings on Travel and Technology 