November 03, 2005 | Thursday

Have search engine, will travel

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |Search Technology

The Yahoo Search team has made some interesting developments in its Yahoo Travel area. Trip Planner shows that Yahoo have long been aware that search is social software. Katherine Tom, Yahoo Travel editor, explains (with screenshots):

Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community.

A Yahoo user comments on Tom’s post that he was dismayed to plan an outing using Trip Planner recently, only to get to the point of booking his trip and finding no way to do so. Tom says that the Yahoo team is currently working on integrating a booking feature into the service, which is still in beta release.

So watch this space. For travel companies, search is getting even more powerful in reaching potential customers.