CSIRO has teamed with innovative Sydney Internet company Viator Systems to develop an on-line travel planner that will make it easier for agents and travellers to research and plan holidays.

Dubbed 'Trips' (Traveller Itinerary Planning System), it will allow travellers and travel agents to easily tailor holidays depending on a range of personal factors in addition to hard information such as budget, activities and preferred destinations.

CSIRO Project Manager Kevin Cryan says that Trips will be the world's most sophisticated travel planner.

"There are travel planners currently on the market but in comparison they will be quite rudimentary," Mr Cryan says.

"Trips will be much more sophisticated, incorporating CSIRO know-how in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, software engineering, intelligent agent systems and operations research."

Mr Cryan says the CSIRO identified Viator Systems, which develops and markets the Saint travel database, as the leading company in its field.

Viator has received preliminary approval from the Commonwealth Government R&D Start Board for a grant to fund the project, which will involve over 20 scientists across four CSIRO Project Teams.

"CSIRO has been seeking a travel industry partner to exploit its artificial intelligence/scheduling technologies and in Viator we found a company with the ideal business model and expertise to take our work to the global marketplace."

Viator aims to incorporate Trips into the Saint travel database, which is already used by most of Australia's leading online retailers and is soon to be launched internationally by Sabre, the US-based company which handles over one million travel bookings per day.

Viator CEO Rod Cuthbert says that Trips would dramatically enhance the functionality of Saint. "It will create a whole new service to travellers and the travel industry," Mr Cuthbert says.

He says that Trips' most important feature is the ability for users to specify either broad or narrow options, ranging from "I have $25,000 and a family of four; we want to visit Australia, definitely see Sydney, Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef, but that's all we know so far!" to "I'm going to be in Cairns on business on the 12^th. I have a long weekend available and I'd like to see the Reef, do some scuba diving and stay at a Radisson, because I get loyalty points that way."

The system is being developed initially for use by travel agents, who often spend significant time collating data from their CRS and other sources to create proposed itineraries. Trips will provide the agent with a draft itinerary in minutes, which may then be modified and personalised before delivery to the customer.

Mr Cryan says that a large number of CSIRO-developed information technologies were now being utilised by the private sector.

"E-commerce applications that incorporate intelligent functions are the next evolutionary step for the Internet and will provide Australian firms such as Viator with a technical advantage in the global marketplace," he says.

More information:
Rod Cuthbert Viator Systems 02 9361 6137
rodc@viator.com

or

Kevin Cryan CSIRO 02 9325 3242
Kevin.Cryan@cmis.csiro.au
0418 416 726 mobile