ONLINE TRIP PLANNERA NEW INTERNET tool designed to help travellers plan complex trips and combine destinations on a fixed budget is being developed at NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Deri).
The "intelligent trip planner" is being developed in collaboration with an Irish company, Tourist Republic. The initiative, known as TripPlanr, has cost €200,000 to develop. It is being supported by Enterprise Ireland's Innovation Partnership programme.
The technology will combine Touristr.com's traveller recommendations with information from airlines and accommodation providers to suggest the best journey plan possible.
Dr John Breslin, project leader with Deri, said the information deficit that existed before the internet has been replaced with information overload. "We are faced with an overwhelming surfeit of similar-sounding destination descriptions and offers. We hope to make online trip planning much more personalised by enabling networked knowledge using the latest technologies developed here."
The TripPlanr project has a skilled development team in place, and is currently recruiting web developers.
Tourist Republic is a technology start-up company based in the Enterprise Acceleration Centre at Limerick Institute of Technology. It spent the last year developing a travel and networking website, Touristr.com, with the aim of allowing its users to plan, share and book trips online.
The website is a source of reviews, stories, adventures and photographs associated with destinations, which would help the traveller to decide on a destination.