Comtec is developing a system which allows users to search by a wider range of holiday attributes and plans to unveil the first phase at World Travel Market next month. The attributes search system will allow people to search for holidays which are, for example, family friendly or include a hotel with a swimming pool. Chief technology officer Humphrey Sheil said…
Comtec to develop searchable attributes system
Comtec is developing a system which allows users to search by a wider range of holiday attributes and plans to unveil the first phase at World Travel Market next month.
The attributes search system will allow people to search for holidays which are, for example, family friendly or include a hotel with a swimming pool.
Chief technology officer Humphrey Sheil said the company had trawled through information it receives from UK tour operators and devised a list of about 14 attributes that consumers can choose from.
He said: “It’s going beyond price, date and availability driven search. It’s trivial to build it from the brochures we load up but the hard piece is getting the best of worlds in terms of search and attributes and provide the accurate price and availability information.”
The system will be integrated into Comtec’s API and made available for desktop applications as well as the web.
Phase two of the project enables a free text search through a database of all the brochure content and the plan is to make that available in the second quarter of 2010.
“It’s a project we are resurrecting from a couple of years ago and takes attribute based search to a higher level. We have to impose our own structured view on the data because there is no industry standard for any of this. What we can do is allow people to search for a lot more and make the entire search content database free text searchable.”
Sheil said the company was also looking to link in customer relationship marketing elements such as offering a ‘holidays you might like’ suggestion feature and prioritising results based on customer feedback.
