Plnnr.com, a new online service that allows its users to generate detailed trip plans including a day-by-day, customisable itinerary, has been launched. The company says in five simple steps customers get a free, automatically planned itinerary that is easily customisable.

Published: 30 Nov 2010

Plnnr.com, a new online service that allows its users to generate detailed trip plans including a day-by-day, customisable itinerary, has been launched. The company says in five simple steps customers get a free, automatically planned itinerary that is easily customisable.

Plnnr’s technology is based on smart algorithms developed to optimise travel itineraries. The company says its offering is a result of over a year of testing in open-beta using Paris, France, as its testing bed. Plnnr is based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, with offices in San Francisco, California.

Currently, there are 10 major tourist destinations supported, including London, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Rome, San-Francisco and others.

“Plnnr takes away the hassle of planning and ensures travellers will make the most of their trips by actually planning the trip for them. Plnnr is a web based personal tour guide that generates itineraries according to people wishes,” said Mosi Shuchman, co-founder of Plnnr.com. “Instead of using outdated guidebooks, or collecting bits and pieces of information from too many sources and trying to coordinate the information into a working itinerary, Plnnr does all of that for you.”

The final itinerary includes destination attractions to visit, recommendations on things to do, and all the information needed to enjoy a vacation or a trip abroad.

According to the company, only basic trip information is required for it to function including: where you are going, dates, length of stay, theme, intensity and luxury level.

“Plnnr works by trying to plan a trip step by step, but with some smart oversight. The key element though is the scoring mechanism - it tries to score every choice, and takes action according to the best score,” said Imri Goldberg, co-founder of plnnr.com.

Algorithm

Plnnr’s algorithm chooses destinations based on hours of operation, user ratings, convenience and other factors to make each itinerary perfect.

Once a ready-to-use itinerary is established, it is completely customisable.

Goldberg says getting quality content is not easy.

“While automating most of the process, striving to get our content accurate also requires the eye of a human and not a computer, and sometimes even the eye of an expert,” Goldberg said.

“The way Plnnr works is that we automatically collect information from the internet, and then use special algorithms to combine these various sources into a single one. In the literature, this process is described as “entity resolution” and it is not a trivial one. For example, Kensington Market is called “Kensington Market” in Frommers, but “Kensington Market and Spadina Avenue” in TripAdvisor. While this may seem easy, consider more obscure cases where the place names are more different, or even cases where the place names are in different languages,” Goldberg explained the same on the company’s blog.

Goldberg added, “Naturally, any algorithm to solve such a problem can’t be perfect. As a result, before publishing a new city, we let our content editors go over the data and fix errors. Another algorithm we have is one that automatically assigns tags to places. For example, it determined that St. Michael’s Cathedral is a religious site, or that the Old City Hall should be tagged under “History and Culture”. This algorithm as well is not always correct, and sometimes it adds tags by mistake, and sometimes it omits tags that should be there. Our content editors fix that as well.”