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Travolution Summit soundbites:
Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman told delegates at the technology summit this week that travel sites had become too complex to answer simpler user enquiries.
The internet entrepreneur said the thousands of travel sites on the web were now “fantastically complex†but could not respond with a “straight answer†when consumers asked for specific preferences like “somewhere hot, somewhere less than six hours away and somewhere that’s golf and child-friendly.â€
He said: “Everyone has these amazingly complicated databases but they are not making it easy at the front end. They need to be a lot simpler.â€
Mr and Mrs Smith cofounder James Lohan revealed that he is taking the upmarket travel site to the US in three weeks, something that Lastminute has historically baulked at.
Lohan admitted: “It’s been a bit more complex than we thought it would be but a little naivety pushed things along. We will be taking a road-show approach, taking the US city by city.â€
US metasearch company Kayak’s cofounder and CEO Steve Hafner said no travel site had yet managed to successfully integrate user-generated content into their site in a meaningful way. He said: “TripAdvisor is great for hotel reviews but it does not tell you the whole story. A site that can mix reviews with availability will have a successful product.â€
by Dinah Hatch
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