Itinerary bookmarking sites should link to reservation systems

One new travel website functionality theme is the itinerary bookmarking site. You know the ones - you hop around a site (or around a collection of sites) adding events, accommodation, attractions into a single itinerary on a day by day basis. These itineraries can then be shared between friends, printed out, bragged about on your blog etc. Some have referred these sites to the “delicious” of online travel.

The following sites have this style of functionality:

• TravelMuse - you can add components to your trip from 3rd party websites
• PlanetEye (from Microsoft) - an interesting move by Microsoft and not yet integrated with Farecast. Microsoft now have two dedicated travel tools - neither matched by Google (who prefer to create non-industry specific web infrastructure rather than domain specific tools). Google are falling behind now - will they have to acquire to catch up? Do they care about keeping up with Microsoft in travel?
• Yahoo Trip Planner
• TripWiser
• TripTie
• TravelGator

TripIt is worth a quick mention in this context - but they work backwards - i.e. you build an itinerary after booking (rather than pre-booking).

Are there others? I am sure there are? (there are quite a few itinerary building sites wrapped on a single website - but the ones on my list above are generic tools for all kinds of travel - rather than single company specific).

Linking to reservation systems
Where these itinerary tools fail is that even after going to all the effort of creating an itinerary you can’t do much with them. The effort (made by the user) isn’t rewarded sufficiently in order to become commonplace on the web.

Yes you can share your itineraries….. and you can print them out…. but the next two steps are:

• Able to send them to a travel company to “price up”
• Able to send them to a travel company to “book”.

As a reservation system provider, I would be delighted to integrate with one of these tools. For example all we would need is, when a component is added to an itinerary, would be an internal reference ID (its going to have to a long one, as we may have to merge multiple references into one!).

Then, once an itinerary is built by the user, we would like to receive some XML outlining what the proposed itinerary is. We could then either “quote” for it (automatically) or book it - depending upon what the user wants. It may also be possible to send different components to different suppliers (for example our reservation system is used my multiple destination activity organisers - we could break an incoming itinerary into bits and divide between accounts).

So come on itinerary building websites - start to work on this kind of linking. You could easily build it so that it works generically for all sorts of reservation systems (not just us obviously). If you don’t, we will!

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