Google and Yahoo! have added some new search features for travelers. Both companies have their own style-Google with its typically minimalist functionality and Yahoo! with its “come in and stay a while” style.
If you type in two destinations into the Google search box, for example “Louisville Maui,” (take a moment this cool October and have a mental Mai Tai with me), the search results now bring up a flights link with a “departing” and “returning” box to enter flight dates. The main link takes you directly to Expedia, but Hotwire and Orbitz are other choices.
Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google mentioned there were some bugs, including “some cities that don’t work and issues with cities with multiple names.”
I tried out cities that exist in several different states, like “Lexington Springfield.” Google understood I meant Lexington, Kentucky-either because I entered a Kentucky query earlier or maybe there’s not an airport in another Lexington like in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! announced a new feature called Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. This is a nifty looking tool that allows you to plan a trip from start to finish with as much detail as you like and save it to their database to share. You can check out other people’s trips and draw from those as well.
“Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more. When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community,” reads the Yahoo! Search Blog.
