iXiGO.com Launches Trip Planner - an Industry First

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Jun 05, 2012, 02:45 ET

NEW DELHI, June 05,2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Indian Travel Site Launches Visual Trip Planning Product

iXiGO.com, India's leading travel search engine, today announced the launch of "Trip Planner" - http://www.ixigo.com/q, a first-of-its-kind product for trip planning and travel research. Unlike horizontal search engines that respond to user queries in the form of links to pages with information, iXiGO Trip Planner attempts to understand user inputs and presents curated travel content summarized in a visual representation of options for modes of transportation, directions and rich information about destinations. It further allows travelers to discover the cheapest and fastest ways of going from one town to another and includes ideas on what to do there, where to stay, and where to eat. This user-friendly approach, allowing travelers to type a query in natural language and presenting a unique infographic for the answer, is a global industry first.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120517/100457 )

iXiGO's Trip Planner is most suitable for travelers who wish to make an informed choice of modes of transportation for their trip, across flights, trains, buses and taxis. In addition, the Trip Planner shows relevant destination information with the top recommendations from the web. A sample query for "Lucknow to Shimla" - http://www.ixigo.com/q/lucknow-to-shimla yielded several interesting options for the journey, ranging from the fastest combination of a flight and a taxi, to the cheapest combination of a train and a bus. In addition, the Trip Planner also showed the distance, driving directions for the trip, and for Shimla - weather, what to see, top restaurants, top hotels in budget, mid-range and luxury categories, and nearby destinations of interest. One can further deep-dive into each category and get detailed information on locations, descriptions, rates / prices / entry fees, opening times, best time to visit and more.

"With Trip Planner, we are creating a paradigm shift in how travelers research and consume travel information!" - said Aloke Bajpai, CEO and Co-Founder iXiGO.com. "The biggest problem on Internet today is that there is too much information fragmented across several websites. Our team has curated the most useful travel information from the web and we are presenting it in a never-seen-before user experience. Everything you could possibly look for is on that one page. This eliminates the need of going from one website to another in search of relevant quality information for decision-making related to trip planning."

"We're evolving from being a travel search engine to becoming an interactive travel knowledge engine, by developing an understanding of common travel-related queries and answering them just like a human being would," explains Rajnish Kumar, Co-Founder & CTO, iXiGO.com. "Our objective is to enable our users to converse with our search engine just the way they would converse with a friend or travel guide. Currently our Trip Planner supports queries across 250 Indian cities covering modes of transportation, cheapest/fastest modes, distance, driving directions, flights, trains, buses and cars. This would get further enhanced with more features and functionalities as we broaden our understanding of travel queries in the near future."

iXiGO.com has been known for its industry-first product innovations and has made inroads into semantic search earlier this year, with the launch of a natural language search tool on Facebook & Twitter that understands flight queries made by users of these platforms and responds to them instantly. With Google's launch of its Knowledge Graph recently, the quest for understanding user queries and presenting relevant, curated, contextual information to them is gathering steam. iXiGO's Trip Planner is poised to become a pioneer on this front for the global travel industry.

About iXiGO.com:

iXiGO.com is South Asia's leading online and mobile travel search engine. iXiGO.com's vision is to develop products to ease and simplify the life of travelers and to make travelling a happy and wholesome experience. Their key products like theTripPlanner,FareMapper,FlightPlanner amongst others help a traveler in planning a trip and searching the best travel solution suited to an individual's needs. Launched in 2007 by IIT, INSEAD and Amadeus alumni as the first travel meta-search engine in India, iXiGO's unbiased search results and ease-of-use have won it several accolades from TiE and NASSCOM, and have made it one of the top travel sites in India almost entirely through word-of-mouth from satisfied users. iXiGO.com is an investee company of SAIF Partners & MakeMyTrip Limited. For more information about iXiGO.com, visit www.ixigo.com or m.ixigo.com (mobile). Keep up with interesting trivia, facts and contests around travel by iXiGO.com on Facebook at www.facebook.com/iXiGOcom and Twitter@ ixigorocks .