Smaaz’s Blog

New Functionalities on Yahoo! Travel

May 10th, 2007

This post is brought to you by: Naxos Island, Naxos Accomodation, Naxos Hostels, Korali Hotel, Naxos Hotels

Yahoo! Travel today announced a new personalized Trip Recommendations module - the first of its kind for the travel industry - as well as a number of additional product and site enhancements. The new version of Yahoo! Travel integrates the following features:

Personalized Trip Recommendations - “Today’s Picks” highlight ten destinations that are highly-relevant to individual users, based on recent online activity and preferences. The module offers a source of new travel ideas for the vast majority of adults (87 percent) who agreed they “would like to go on vacation to a place I have never been before.” The module also links to related air/hotel deals, weather, travel tips from Yahoo! users and a destination Travel Guide. An additional “Show Me” drop-down box provides users with more theme-driven suggestions in categories such as, Beach, Nearby, Art/Architecture and Nightlife. These recommendations are fueled by a new tagging feature in Trip Planner, also announced today.

Personalized Travel Deals - Highly-relevant travel deals will be exposed throughout the 45,000 Yahoo! Travel Guides, showing the best hotel and flight options based on your home airport and the most popular prices found by other Yahoo! users. Finding the best deal is as important as ever, according to the 78 percent of adults who plan to take summer vacation this year, about two-thirds (65 percent) say “budget” has the greatest influence on determining their summer vacation destination.

New Mapping Functionality - Using Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Travel is demonstrating a new mapping prototype that allows other maps to be layered over a Yahoo! Map to show greater detail of a particular location and more customized mapping options. See examples of this within the Yahoo! Travel Guides on maps of the Grand Canyon at http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2808381 and the Freedom Trail at http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2827476.

Yahoo! Messenger Flight Planner - Using the patent-pending, collaborative Flight Planner plug-in on Yahoo! Messenger, users can research and book flights in real-time with friends and family. Yahoo! Messenger’s Flight Planner plug-in searches for the best fares on Yahoo! FareChase and allows users to view and select their favorite flight choices together.

Yahoo! Trip Planner Tagging - Travelers can now insert tags within the popular Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner (i.e. tag their weekend getaway Trip Plan to Paris as “romantic”) to better organize their Trip Plans and give other users a great way to discover interesting travel information.

Entry Filed under: Yahoo!