Published on 11/19/2008
By Ravit Lichtenberg (blog)
YourTour, a Belgian company, is among the demoing companies at the Dow Jones Venture Wire Technology Showcase. YourTour helps people turn highly complex travel simple by enabling them to build full itinerary based on advanced criteria such as budget, accommodation, and attractions. Users start from the location they want to travel to, their budget, duration, and number of people--and then are able to choose from a number of accommodation options (hotel? Chateaus?), available attractions (Museum? EuroDisney?), frequency of hotel changes, etc.
For their data, YourTour has partners with the hotel database, booking.com and LonelyPlanet.com; their “powerful algorithm” crunches all the data in the back and delivers results within 20 seconds.
Keeping things simple seems to be the guiding principle for this Mons Polytechnic’s department of mathematics spinoff. Still in private beta, the company is focusing on travel in France and plan to extend to Spain and Italy next. The interface is plane but it seems to work. This will make it easy for the company to act on its users feedback. User generated content will also be integrated—for now, user ratings are used to influence the order of displayed results.