Highly personalised planning: is it really possible?

Ever tried and failed to plan a four-day trip to London or Paris that takes into account distances between places, when restaurants and activities are open while including the events going on during the season of your travel? By combining human expertise with the latest in artificial intelligence Utrip, a new ‘highly personalised’ travel planning tool claims to have the solution.

There seem to have been a proliferation of trip planning tools in recent months. Utrip is one of these but it believes it goes much further than most in its aim to provide a highly personalised travel planning experience. Other tools, it says, help you find unique activities and restaurants or are little more than prebuilt itineraries. Utrip, however, says it not only finds you the best restaurant, museum or beach in a city, it also considers lodging, the duration of stay, other interests and many more influencers to suggest a complete trip.

EyeforTravel.com spoke to Lynn Chou, media director, at Utrip to find out what it’s all about.

EFT: Tell us about the business model and how are you going to monetise this?  

LC: Just like the big players once a trip is planned and booked, Utrip receives commissions on the back end working with partners like Expedia, hostelbookers and so on. We will be adding more purchasable options like tours, sports event, and so on soon. The service is completely free for our customers.

EFT: Why is itinerary management so important and what do you do that is different?  

LC:Itinerary management is an important part of travel because when planning a trip it’s important that your activities fit together. For example, you may know that you want to go to a specific museum or scenic lookout over the city. Well going to the museum early in the morning will have you avoid lines while going to the city lookout at sunset will give you the best experience. We take these and many other factors, such as seasonality and geo-location, into account to ensure the best possible trip for you.

We don’t just suggest the best activities, restaurants and hotels we also put them in the right order. Of course if you have other ideas we make it easy to change things around.

Many people still use travel agents today to help them create itineraries. Because we live feeds as well as customisable algorithms, we can create truly personalised itineraries.

With Utrip, any traveller can quickly, easily, and cheaply experience their favorite team’s soccer game in Madrid on Friday, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona for free on Sunday, and enjoy Oktoberfest on Wednesday in time for the big opening celebration, all while flying on the cheapest days of the week.

EFT: How do you integrate with other social networks?  

 LC: To make the account creation process even simpler, users may log in with their Facebook account on our site. Once they have planned a trip, they can share their itineraries with family and friends via email and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

We are currently working to create deeper levels of integration with Facebook to further personalise our suggestions based on each individual’s interests. Additionally, we are working on a collaborative planning tool that will help users get recommendations and feedback from friends in their social networks.

EFT: With the introduction of Facebook Graph Search many are saying that Facebook is going to get into Trip Planning - how can you compete?

LC: We are very excited about Facebook’s Graph Search; we think it will enrich the experience for users. But our methodology is different. Because we don’t believe that travel and exploration means doing what your friends like doing and going where your friends have gone, our focus is different. After all you are not the average of your friends. We partner with experts on the ground in each of our destinations; these experts make all sorts of recommendations from the best hours to eat and experience nightlife to the best hole in the wall restaurants or hidden private beach. We then combine this knowledge with our algorithms to create truly unique trips.

EFT: Social planning is very hot in the travel sphere today but is it enough?

LC: We think social can be helpful but doesn’t complete the information that is needed when travellers plan trips.Social content is free, available, and easy to use but social planning has two major limitations: information insufficiency and lack of personalisation. For instance, even if you can find five friends within your social networks who have been to Bora Bora, information available to you is probably not sufficient to plan a complete trip. In addition, each person is independent, unique and quirky with different interests, desires, and constraints. In reality none of us are an average of our extended social circles. So Utrip combines the best of human expertise with the latest in Artificial Intelligence.

EFT: What do you see as the big trends in travel over the next 12 months?

LC: We see personalisation as the biggest trend. Every traveller wants an authentic, unique experience. There has been an explosion of new activities, tours, stuff do and things to see. So much so that it’s now become hard to sort through and decide which things to do. For example TripAdvisor has over a million items. If you spent even just five minutes on each item to see if it was right for you it would take you almost ten years straight to go through everything. The trend is in looking through that giving the top ten for each traveller based on their unique interests, desires and constraints.

EFT: What does it take to develop an app like this? What are the big challenges?  

LC: The top challenges are combining computer knowledge with human knowledge. We have overcome these challenges by putting our heads down and working long days until it comes out just right.

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