Friday, June 05, 2015

Smarter On-line Travel Agent Needed

I was planning to attend the Second International Conference on Open and Flexible Education (ICOFE 2015) in Hong Kong 16-17 July on the way to the 10th International Conference on Computer Science and Education (ICCSE 2015) in Cambridge, UK, 22-24 July. So I tried asking travel agents to get me there. What I discovered was that travel agents are really just flight and package tour booking agents. What I wanted to do was give them the parameters where I wanted to be when and have them work out an optimal way to get there. What they wanted me to do is to say precisely when and how I wanted to travel and then they would book it. If that is all the human travel agent does, then I might as well book directly on-line. There would seem to be scope for creating an on-line travel agent where you give it parameters of costs, times and preferred modes of travel and it works out a route.

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