TravelMole eWire Q&A: Lastminute.com

Pablo Alvarez is group innovation manager for lastminute.com. He spoke to Dinah Hatch

Q: Please explain your radar technology and how it will benefit the travel industry

A: Radar is a location-based service for travellers. It uses your nearest WiFi networks and internet address (IP address) to locate you, the traveller. We launched it in collaboration with Google and its new Gears location enabler.

For now a traveller on the go with a laptop can locate hotels around him or her. We will also be adding nearby theatre shows, restaurants and gigs. Mobility isn’t just about mobile phones and radar is a good example of this.

Q: How is fonefood going? What sort of customer is using it and how can the travel industry harness this product?

A: Fonefood is geo-specific plus mobile plus internet plus Europe-wide plus multi-language: the combination of all this is an important innovation in the travel industry.

The location element uses the ID of the cell tower the phone is connected to, so it will work quickly and indoors as well as outdoors. Although it will only give a coarse accuracy, the speed and convenience will often mean it is preferable to GPS. We use a combination of providers depending on the handset. For instance, on Windows Mobile we use Gears from Google, which works right in the browser. For Nokia smartphones and the iPhone we’re developing custom applications. There’s also something in the works for the G1 Android phone that we hope to announce soon.

The USA, UK, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain… all these “markets” have different patterns of mobile usage. Language is also a key issue when using your mobile phone, as it is regarded as a quite personal device. Language can be a barrier if you want to communicate to, for example, book a restaurant while travelling abroad in another country. Using fonefood, an English speaking traveler can easily book a table and get a confirmation code to have dinner in Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona or Munich without having to speak Swedish, French, Spanish or German. Any traveler with a mobile phone could book a restaurant in the available language of her/his choice in just a few clicks from a mobile phone and from anywhere in the world.

Q: Pls explain pronto and how it works and what benefits it will bring to the travel industry

A: Lastminute’s Pronto is a new way to enter a search. It can be used on lastminute.com to find hotels, flights or restaurants. Pronto is a one box search function that allows the construction of a sentence to search for travel and leisure options, for example ‘Paris on Friday’, ‘I would like a five star hotel on 10 November in Gran Canaria for three nights’, ‘table for two in Covent Garden this evening’.

Pronto is an innovative user experience in several ways. It allows a user to specify any number of search criteria in any order that makes sense to create a structured search. It doesn’t assume any natural language in the underlying search system, but it guides a user toward entering a query that the search system will be able to serve. It extends the auto-complete functionality that is common on the internet for single search boxes and applies it to more complex search forms with many criteria. It also presents a very simple clean interface to the user, hiding the underlying complexity of drop-downs, checkboxes, optional fields, “advanced search” and similar UI clutter normally taking up large amounts of space on ecommerce sites. At any time the options presented are dependent on what has already been entered. If the user has already entered a destination and a departure date for a flight, they will only be offered the remaining valid choices (in that case, a return date or duration, a departure airport, etc). The options presented to the user are merely the most common but the system understands a wider vocabulary. For instance you can ask for a “cheap hotel” (return sorted by cheapest first). Although the current live version of pronto serves just hotel, flight and restaurant searches in English, we also have French and German versions close to launch, and we are also working on adding further product categories such as theatre tickets, gifts, flight and hotel combinations, package holidays and car rentals. All the different products (representing 78 different input fields on the current lastminute.com site, or 162 counting advanced search) will be available from the single pronto search box.

Q: Mobile technology seems to be the new buzz phrase in travel, overtaking social networking. How do you see both moving forward in 2009?

A: We see both converging into Mobile 2.0; that means giving users the possibility to interact with friends and with contextual services while on the go no matter where they are

Q: Will the recession dramatically alter the way we travel? How?

A: We don’t anticipate the recession to dramatically alter the way people travel. The choices people make are likely to change as people adapt to working towards a tighter budget, for example taking shorter breaks, holidaying more in the UK or taking more group holidays to make greater savings for example. We know that travel is still one of the last things people are prepared to give up, even when there is a recession. People are likely to forgo the new sofa or kitchen so they can fulfil their desire to travel.

The lastminute.com labs team is building new innovative services next year, and our way of working includes a lot of time spent with customers to understand what they need and want and to try out different concepts. If the customer needs or attitudes change because of financial concerns, we will adapt and change our projects accordingly. We believe we have a lot of great deals to offer customers that will be even more relevant in a recession.

Q: What are lastminute.com’s strategies for weathering the downturn?

A: The great thing about lastminute.com is our lifestyle component, which allows us to differentiate and offer customers something else than just travel. We are increasingly looking at how we can capitalise on it and package our travel and lifestyle component to offer our customers a complete lifestyle experience, something which our competitors are not able to do.  

Q. What’s next for lastminute? What are you working on now?

A: We continue exploring different innovations and areas, mainly mobility services, definitely LBS (location based services) and engaging customers in a truly inspirational mobile experience with our brand (not just extrapolating what we already have on the web).

Stay with us and keep alert … more innovations to come in the next months. All our new work is announced on labs.lastminute.com