New Personality-Based Holiday Planning Creates Meaningful Travel Experiences

Personalization Comes to Travel Planning

The new site holidays.barbados.org is setting such a high standard for personal holidays that they are also calling the site holidays-exclusivelyours.com. These personal holidays are based on character and behavior as much as hotel features. To make this work, the team at Holidays Barbados have hand-picked properties in 6 key categories and identified each one using 30 different character traits. Travel visitors to the site are also profiled based on their clicks, likes and behavior. The result is a perfect match, where travelers are matched with places to stay that have similar character. “It’s an expert system made for holiday planning,” says Kathy-Lynn Ward, the chief architect of the system and its programmer.

“It takes time and local knowledge to create the characterization of the hotel,” Ward says. “Some of the traits are obvious, like ‘traditional’ or ‘cool’, but many are much more nuanced, like ‘understated’.”

Hotels have Personality

It may seem strange to describe a building in such personal terms. But, as the team explains, a hotel is so much more that a building. There are guests, staff and management that all contribute to its character. Style, decor, garden, location, price and demeanor are considered. The end result is a characterization that is very unique for each property.

Skip to page 14 in the magazine below to get the full story. Visit http://holidays.barbados.org to see it in action.

6 Holiday Personality Categories Featured

The 6 characters are various ‘sophistcats’, according Ian R. Clayton, CEO of the company. “It is derived from work we pioneered with Realholidays Dynamic Planning and have now refined for this service. For this project, everyone is a sophisticat but some, like the AristoCat, may have more refined expectations than the FrugalCat or the CasualCat. We had fun with these categories, but they are a actually a serious attempt to classify people and hotels so that we can pair them up with an ambiance as much as we do based on price and facilities.”

See the Cats at http://holidays.barbados.org/travelers-profiles/

Exclusively Yours Expert Engine  for Other Destinations

Clayton adds that while the software was developed for Barbados it can work for any destination, hotel association, booking portal or travel planning service. We plan to make it available to others and can help destinations integrate the software and the exclusively yours expert engine into whatever booking systems and web platform they have.

Printed copies of the magazine may be purchased at

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/770775

Special Note
– Atlantis Submarines Barbados in conjunction with holidays.barbados.org
is offering magazine readers a special discount.
Get details at http://holidays.barbados.org/free-barbados-magazine/