Timescenery, a travel planning site that combines data from suppliers with crowdsourced experiences from travelers, has launched a partnership with Baarb, an artificial intelligence company that develops solutions to personalize online travel search.
The collaboration follows a successful test of Baarb’s
platform by Timescenery.
Timescenery allows travelers to plan trips within a single interface and pulls information from Booking.com, RentalCars.com, Google Maps, Wikipedia and other sites along with first-person trip details; with Baarb’s AI technology, the company plans to optimize its hotel search and increase and speed up bookings.
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Barbara Parshall, CEO of Baarb, says travel needs to address
the shifts taking place in search behavior as users rely more on mobile booking
and voice-activated devices.
"We can’t continue to get 3,000 generic results. It’s a huge
problem for the industry," she says.
"When you tell Alexa, I need to book a hotel
in Chicago next Wednesday night … Alexa needs to give you three results that are
based on your past behavior and what you are looking for on this trip.
"That’s
our roadmap. So we are starting now with the natural language search, which is
done in text, but it will eventually become completely voice activated.”
Timescenery and Baarb both were accelerated by
Plug and Play, Silicon Valley’s global innovation platform for startups, corporations,
and investors.