Opodo launches EscapeMap – map based flight searching

M-Travel just picked up that Opodo have recently launched a “map and click” booking tool. Opodo have described it as “Europe’s first”.

Well they are not first in Europe (and HotelWorldMap, a Hotels.com affiliate, probably weren’t first either – although it is worth a look ). There are also other versions out there outside of Europe - for example one by Air New Zealand.

What do I think of the Opodo sytem?

Well it is nice – it makes heavy use of Google maps and AJAX. Nothing wrong with that however it does leave them open to a couple of problems as they haven’t hidden their AJAX source code (as it is all JavaScript in the browser)

• Opodo have exposed a nice API to “extract” their special offer data – all in XML. A big thank you from their competitors who can now compare their special offers with Opodo whenever they want, all systematically. (See here for an example XML response). Knowing how much price & availability screen scraping goes on in the online travel industry I don’t know how they overlooked this.
• Opodo say they are going to release a hotel version “later in the year”. However, actually it is mainly in this release already – they have just commented it out in the JavaScript source code. For those that want to know, they will let you filter on Average temperature, Star Rating, Seaside and Culture – and price.
• Terminology – they have used the term “blackout period” – while I know what this is – I can’t be sure that too many consumers will. I suggest that is rewritten to be more clear to non travel expert users.
• The exit from their search system is poorly integrated. If you go to buy a flight you have just found via this search (missing the fact that most of the links are actually broken right now – but that is a bug they will fix) – then you end up on a “landing page”. If you have selected a Birmingham to Paris special offer – on the landing page you have to enter your “Birmingham” airport request again……

So, in summary, nice idea but needs better integration – and also the link bug fixing.  I would also invest in a JavaScript obfuscator (something that mangles the source code so that browsers can still read them, but users can’t easily) – if they are going to continue down this AJAX route.

(I should disclose that I wrote the design specification for a similar system for a UK airline, in 2003, but it wasn’t as clever as the more recent mapping systems. I have also worked indirectly on behalf of Opodo in the past.)

Go to EscapeMap on Opodo.co.uk

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