Trip Planner vs Trip Tracker

Trip Planner is a new travel tool from Yahoo!They’re giving away two plane tickets a day to those who enter a trip into their database. You can explore trips, browse trips and create trips. A login to an Yahoo! account is needed. You can view existing, publicly-shared trips identified by tags placed on global Yahoo! Map. I viewed a one-month trip “Stockholm: World cup 2006″ created by Dave_Bohn, Sweden. The trip had photos, comments and the number of people who like the entry. There’s a lot of “drilling” that can be had with Yahoo!s Trip Planner — maybe too much for my liking. The more you drill the more you encounter advertising. Personally, I found Yahoo!s interface and navigation way too complex, with too much (unexpected) advertising. I think a re-design is required here. Is it about the trip or about the ads?

Have you seen Trip Tracker.net ? Now here’s a more intuitive, organic interface that is a pleasure to browse. I feel this website is more about the journey, about the people, about the photos and about the trip logs. I viewed a journey named Panamericana from PatetGuy, from Montréal to Panajachel, Honduras, and encountered, uncluttered, clear navigation — in spite of 53 trip entries and 284 photos. A bonus is that trips can also be viewed on Google Earth. Now, Trip Tracker has not yet introduced advertisements. If (when) they do, I recommend they appear at the bottom of each photo/trip entry — out of they way for much of the navigation, yet included where it counts most.

This entry was posted on Thursday 13 July 2006 at 12:02 am and is filed under Website/Event, AFTER the visit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.