Online travel and leisure retailer lastminute.com has worked on its new virtual travel agent booking engine. (6/13/2007)
The new booking tool, nicknamed ‘Judith’ internally after holiday legend Judith Chalmers, according to the company “is the most precise and versatile holiday search engine in the market and launches a new era in booking holidays online.”
John Bevan, Travel Director, lastminute.com said: “Judith is the result of months of research and planning to make sure that we would create the best holiday search engine around and I think our mission is accomplished. With Judith, we are launching the new generation of online holiday bookings. It is like a virtual online travel agent, extremely clever and it can anticipate customers’ next moves, point them in the right direction to find the perfect and most suitable holiday in terms of type of holiday, price, dates, airport departure, destination and hotel. Last week we have registered record sales as our booking numbers more than doubled. Booking holidays on lastminute.com has never been so easy.”
“The search process maintains the customer’s selected requirements throughout the whole procedure including the number of rooms required and the party composition giving only relevant results back to the customer. Furthermore, the advanced search provides a weather feature to search for destinations according to their climate, as well as the opportunity to select the attributes of the resort such as a sandy beach, watersports, good shopping or historic sites, the destination as well as the hotel, making the search more tailored and refined,” stated the company.
“The results from every single search are based on biased intelligence and relevant historic information, which means that the products delivered are all relevant and appealing to the individual consumer booking the holiday. Judith is also intuitive and can anticipate customers’ next moves. It can give very useful advice on how to refine a search when results are either too high or too low, giving suggestions on which categories to alter to get the best outcome.”
