A new travel site is turning the idea of vacation planning on its head by proposing travel deals based on your point of origin instead of your destination.
Bookit.com takes the visitor’s location through his IP address and gives destinations and deals reachable from the visitor’s point of origin. The site, which is created by the father-and-son team of Bud and Jamin Finlaw, also takes the traveler’s preferences into account when proposing deals.
The technology is called Fast Relevant Origin Method technology, or FROM.
Jamin Finlaw tells Travel Weekly that the technology of “origin-based searches were faster, produced more relevant results and were steeped in both local and destination-related marketing opportunities.”
Jesse Henson, Bookit.com’s vice president of marketing, says that the difficult part of the technology is matching airfares and airline schedules with the hotel offerings that the company’s sales force (there are about 200 employees at BookIt) brings back from providers. That’s because flight costs vary by route frequency, day of the week and other variables.
Currently the site offers packages to the US mainland, Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean, and some parts of Central America. It is looking to expand to international destinations in the near future.
Finlaw says that, in a sense, the site mimics online the opportunities that travel agencies traditionally bring to customers who walk in the door and finds locally generated deals for destinations marketed at the agency.
While I haven’t tried to book anything on the site, it looks easy to use. You can even change the originating airport if you need to. While it only lists major airports, it does listen to customer feedback for suggestions on including your favorite airport. In my case, for example, they only list LAX although Bob Hope Airport (BUR) is closer to me.
It has a customer support section with a frequently asked question section and they list the hours of telephone support as well as an e-mail address should you need to contact them. This site will definitely be one that I’ll bookmark.
