Swoodoo and Wanderfly solve online travel search's most pressing problems

I just read this article on Core77. As someone who is passionate about travel, I am always looking for that next great website that helps solve some of the most "pressing" problems in online travel search and booking. In my opinion a few of these are:

• the ability to search for flights based on prices (not destinations),
• the ability to compare prices across both multiple locations AND months,
• the ability to search for countries, regions or states as destinations,
• the ability to search for whole itineraries based on price,
• the ability to search for a cheap weekend get-away,
• and the ability to combine travel information from many different sources (e.g. facebook, foursquare, blogs, etc...).

I found Swoodoo (a German travel website) a couple of months ago and planned my trip to Greece using it. In fact, I only went to Greece because I had searched all warm European countries and found the best prices for a flight to Athens - which happened to return one day later than I had planned but saved me almost 200 Euro!

Swoodoo solves the first couple of "problems" in the list above - esp. their PowerSearch yields incredible results.

Wanderfly seems to top this with integration of social media, new information sources and a great trip planning interface.

Read the article below or check them out directly at Wanderfly.

Wanderfly: Improving the travel experience at the front end

   

Much has been made of improving the design of the travel experience, typically focusing on the actual transportation part; but when it comes to the planning phase of a leisure trip, user experience design has been notably absent.

A new website called Wanderfly aims to change that with a well-designed interface that considers the way people plan trips. Equal parts travel agent, ticket-seller, world-traveling friend and source of travel inspiration, Wanderfly seeks to get you and your suitcase out of the house with minimal hassle.

Sometimes you want to go away, but don't know where you want to go. Wanderfly makes you aware of the possibilities with a simple welcome screen that lets you punch in what you do know: Where you're leaving from and a budget range, letting you set bookends anywhere between $200 and $5,000. Then you enter a rough time window of travel, i.e. mid-November for two days, or next January for 3 weeks.

(more...)

 

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