It's easier than ever to book flights and hotel rooms online. But for travelers on a budget, deciding where to go and when to go there is a surprisingly passive experience. You can sign up for deal alerts from your favorite airline or travel site, but hitting the travel trifecta-(1) a destination you want to visit (2) at a price you can't refuse (3) at a time that fits your schedule-is a serious long shot.
A new suite of data-visualization tools from Orbitz Labs could flip this frustrating scenario on its head. Using data from years of flight- and hotel-booking patterns, the single-purpose research apps help you optimize your getaways. They're unique, useful tools for making long-term travel arrangements-or just playing around with the various data-slicing options.
The launch lineup offers tools that let you discover the cheapest times to book hotel rooms, find personalized picks based on your favorite hotels, and get general hotel recommendations based on your personality or travel details.
'I think a lot of people go through this,' says Wai Gen Yee, chief scientist at Orbitz. '(You) have three months to book and maybe you're still in the coming-up-with-ideas phase. [Orbitz Labs] is kind of inverting what the focus of the data is-instead of focusing purely on bookings, it gives the customer more information to make confident travel decisions.'
The site launched last week, and the current tools are hotel-heavy. For example, there isn't anything that helps demystify the fluctuating rates for airline tickets. However, Orbitz Labs wants these tools constantly evolving based on customer feedback. For now, the flight-related tools fall more on the eye-candy/interesting side of the fence: An animated map that shows flight patterns based on user searches, and a 'Destination Hot Spots' map that shows where people are escaping to.
These one-off features might eventually find their way onto the main Orbitz site; the Labs' projects are more like an incubator and testing ground for experimental ideas. 'As engineers, we aren't thinking as much about the business impact,' says Yee. 'It's just to have fun with the engineering and provide a service for our customers.
With that in mind, Orbitz Labs sounds a lot like a (now-defunct) set of projects at another company: Google Labs. There's a similar ethos of unbridled experimentation for the sake of experimentation behind it. 'The way we see Labs is as a continuation of ideas,' adds Roger Liew, chief technology officer at Orbitz. 'The ones that gain traction are the ones we bring forward to the main product.'
The Orbitz skunkworks also plans to create tools geared toward making travel arrangements for major events. The first to launch were built for making Super Bowl travel arrangements from Denver and Seattle to New York, scanning the five boroughs and New Jersey for hotel deals and listing comparative flight prices in and out of the numerous area airports.
Many of the ideas behind Orbitz Labs developed organically, as engineers on the Orbitz team built their own data-crunching tools for personal use. 'We travel also, and we have access to a ton of data,' says Yee. 'We'd write some SQL to get some data out of the database, and then we'd get a good picture about how to make travel decisions...'
After cleaning up the interfaces for the tools, the team started sharing them with co-workers and friends. That prompted the inevitable question: Why not make them public? While the current tools on the Labs site are based solely on internal data, that may change soon. Yee says they have plans to use data from other sources in the future, and Liew provided a very specific example.
'Something we've been talking about a lot is putting in weather,' says Liew. 'We're based in Chicago. When your wakeup temperature is negative 11, you think, where can we go that isn't here?'
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