We like this: LIVE flight sales on Google Earth
It seems every time I go to the Lastminute.com offices in London, there is always plenty of stuff to pictures of with a mobile phone.
In the old days a TV behind the reception desk used to run an endless reel of promos and interviews with Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane-Fox.
But not any more.
The "whizzkids" working in the tech labs for the pink'un have developed a layer for Google Earth which displays live flight sales from across the company, updated every minute.
During my 15 minutes in reception, plenty of lines appeared across Europe, a few less into North America, quite a lot to the Middle East and none, unsurprisingly, to the Antarctic.
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
Technorati tags: lastminute google earth
5 comments:
You know its not that difficult to do things like that thanks to Google's api but its really effective.
I really do think that integration is the real name of the game and Google are masters of it.
What about travel products that can do the same with the use if similar api's.
All you see is white label this and white label that, why not have an open api that allows anyone to add travel content to their site or map or application etc.
You build something into Google, good for you... You give 1000 people the ability to build your source into Google, great for you !
Mark
ShopQwik.com
Anonymous: Spam... Do not post here again.
Mark: indeed, it is very easy...
can you expand further on what you were saying in the second part?
well, I think that travel, while having many parameters, is not that difficult to set up with a reqular set of api commands.
Lets say, like google, you allow people pick a start and end location and it automatically requests flight availability. If the user selects a flight it then goes to the api's home website to complete the booking or opens a small popup or widget to complete to booking depending on what was most acceptable.
Hotels, Car hire and cruses are easily possible and it means that you can add to the api, roll out the service and let lots of people use it as needed.
You can have a profit share much like click throughs and everybody makes money.
The only concern would be the tranactional security so that bookings were completed in the correct manner but even that is achieveable.
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