PlanetEye
Travel Beyond Words
September 20th, 2008
Welcome to the New PlanetEye
- Butch Langlois
- former President & CEO
Since our beta launch a few months ago, the team at PlanetEye has been digesting feedback from our users and refining our value proposition. It culminates in our new site design that launched today.
It is an exercise many Web companies embark on as they strive to find their fit or sweet-spot in the market. For PlanetEye, it involved taking inventory of our strengths, emphasizing them, and making sure users could find those site elements quickly and easily. In other words, we wanted to ensure PlanetEye is a place where people can dream…and plan their trips more efficiently and effectively.
I often talk about our goal of helping travelers maximize their enjoyment of a destination while minimizing their frustration, and I’m confident PlanetEye can fulfill that promise for our users.
A discussion we often have at PlanetEye is that planning travel today can be a difficult and a time consuming exercise. Research shows that trip planning usually involves extensive Web surfing across many sites to find all the various aspects (flights, hotels, attractions, etc.) of a successful trip.
You book a hotel at one site but not until reading user reviews at another site, and then verifying pricing options across a number of other sites. Then, it’s back to a mapping site to see where the hotel might be located. Are there great restaurants and attractions nearby? Sure, there are many places on the Web to find recommendations such as The New York Times, yelp.com, wherethelocalseat.com, restaurantica.com. And they all do a great job. Whether you’re looking for luxury or a budget experience, there is a resource for you.
Okay, I have some restaurant and attraction ideas so let’s go back to a good map site to see if we can group these together to organize my day better.
Yikes, this is getting to be a workout!
Maybe I should check out some great photos of the destination? Google Earth or Flickr can give me a good view of things (After all, I don’t want to be in a bad part of town and photos don’t lie). And too bad I didn’t realize the once-in-a-lifetime golf course was just outside the city limits. If only I had remembered to get out that Golf magazine from six months ago that listed the top-10 don’t miss courses from around the world.
Okay, that’s a lot of surfing and the only thing I’ve booked at this point is maybe a hotel.
We believe that every piece of relevant travel data exists somewhere on the Web today but accessing it when you need it and presenting in a contextual way to help you plan is challenging.
So that’s where we see the problem….and we just happen to have some great assets that help us address it. At the core of PlanetEye is our ability to manage large amounts of media (photos or data) efficiently and rapidly, and presenting these results on a map or in narrative form with proximity as an underlying factor. These abilities lets us aggregate a broad range of editorial content and recommendations to supplement our own community-generated content to present great recommendations to you during your planning process.
To take it a step further and personalize your travel planning, we have features that influence how we present data back to you. These personalization features are what we refer to as Trusted Sources, Travel Interests and Travel Packs.
Trusted Sources are partners or sources of content that can affect how recommendations are shown to you. For people who see a source such as Where The Locals Eat as more influential than the New York Times, they can select the appropriate influencer in their profile and, voila, their recommendations are prioritized.
In the same way, your travel interests can also influence our recommendations. If golf is more important than landmarks, Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego will be recommended in priority over a museum, for example.
While we are continually adding new sources of data to create new travel ideas, we know that we will not be able to provide all the sources our users may want. Hence, the Travel Pack.
The Travel Pack is the vehicle for our local experts and members to share great travel ideas they’ve either experienced or come across, and would like share or recall in the future with the PlanetEye community.
For example, I created a Travel Pack featuring Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants (from Hell’s Kitchen fame) around the world. By creating this Travel Pack, I can now easily recall those locations when I’m planning a trip to a city where one of his restaurants is located.
In the same way, the community will benefit by having my Travel Pack suggestions when they’re looking at a destination where one of Gordon’s restaurants is located. They can even grab the Travel Pack for their own so it becomes part of their profile for easy recall.
I think of the Travel Pack as the manila folder a really organized person would create by clipping out of magazines and newspapers when they come across great things to do somewhere. The top 10 public golf courses in the USA by Golf Magazine? Got it, and I’ll now be able to recall it when I travel anywhere where one of these courses are located.
The Travel Pack is a powerful tool for community members to share great things about their own city as well as their travels, or other relevant travel content they come across that they want to recall or share.
While PlanetEye users will come up with many variations of Travel Packs, there are three versions I like to create.
The first is a best of list, in this case My Favorite Restaurants; the second is a list of places or photos that may influence my travels that I want to recall, this is a fun one Seinfeld Geography; and the third is a trip I’ve taken that I want to share, this was my trip to Berlin for the ITB Berlin Travel Conference earlier this year.
We welcome your feedback so we can keep the boat headed in the right direction for our users. I also want to thank the team here at PlanetEye, who worked many late nights getting this release out the door, and our partner, Happy Cog, who collaborated with us on the design.
Technorati Tags: happy cog, planeteye
Tags: happy cog, PlanetEye, Travel Pack
6 Responses to “Welcome to the New PlanetEye”
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September 21st, 2008 at 9:29 am
I’m looking forward to watching PlantEye evolve.You’ve already done so much and I definitely think you have the boat pointed in the righte direction. Good lub
Might want to have a look at commenting on the blog though – the right side goes into oblivion on my laptop.
Cheers!
Julia Rosien
Managing Editor
Restaurantica.com
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 am
[...] Here’s our press release and blog post from our CEO, Butch [...]
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Thanks so much for the compliment Julie.
We are also big fans of the Restaurantica concept and content
If your in Toronto at some point we’d love to host you at our offices.
All the best,
–Butch
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:33 pm
[...] from TechCrunch. Mark has his own take on it here, and CEO Langlois has some thoughts on it at the PlanetEye blog. [...]
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Butch,
This is a totally mistaken strategy. No one wants to go to an unknown site like PlanetEye to get aggregated data. It doesn’t help that the site itself, even with the new redesign, is too confusing for most users. Travel packs, trusted sources…are you kdidding me? I just want to find a freakin hotel and some good eats. I’ll go to Expedia and NYT and maybe even Fodor’s. Those are trusted sources. As for PlanetEye, I can confidently say that it has absolutely no chance of making a dent in the travel market. Typical case of a technology company getting carried away with features and not understanding what users really want and need. Epic Fail.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:52 am
Jezebel,
Ouch, that comment is not a great one to see first thing in the morning but we are an equal opportunity blog regardless
Sorry, you’re finding it so difficult to use PlanetEye. We take this feedback seriously and try to continually improve the user experience.
We also respect users desire to use their own reliable sources for direction. Heck, we even try and feature those sources as our “Trusted Sources”.
The New York Times is a good case in point. If you explore anywhere in the world you will see the New York Times recommendations front and center in the algorithm that points out recommendations to you as a user.
Those restaurant, hotel listings, etc. feature a link back to the original review on the Trusted Source if you want to read more. There also could be other reviews from sources like Where the Locals Eat or one of our Local Experts or community members who will also affect that particular listing further up the recommendation chain.
But if you as a user, as you point out about yourself, favor a particular source like the NY Times, then you can select them as a favored “Trusted Source” in your profile so their recommendations are weighted more heavily in the personalized way the algorithm presents recommendations to you as a user. (I have them as one of my default “Trusted Sources” so maybe we have alike travel interests).
Knowing the New York Times can not cover every travel aspect of a destination, you can use their recommendations as anchors in your Travel Pack (things you don’t want to miss) to see other recommended places to eat and stay, as well as places from a wide variety of other sources, including community recommendations.
Anyway, thanks for your comments. Please do not shy away from providing more feedback either on our blog or through the feedback button on the site. I see them all.
Regards,
–Butch