Felix Laboy Photo Credit: Business Wire
Since Travelocity founder Terry Jones formed WayBlazer last October, the start-up has generated plenty of industry interest but has revealed little about its projects. This week, though, Trisept Solutions, the creators of Vax Vacation Access, became the first company to announce a partnership with WayBlazer -- doing so as it unveiled Xcelerator, a platform that will use WayBlazer's and IBM Watson's cognitive computing technology to enable travel agents to more easily book tailored vacations for clients. Senior Editor Robert Silk spoke with WayBlazer CEO Felix Laboy about the project.
Q: Can you explain how Xcelerator will make it easier for a travel agent to find the perfect trip?
A: Basically, WayBlazer and IBM-involved technology enables deeper discovery in the travel offering data.
So in the case of Xcelerator, the agent will be able to go deeper in discovery of the data for cruise, hotel and tours by using tools that can do a natural language search.
Q: What is a natural language search?
A: It's the ability to interact with the system as if you were talking with a person or a travel agent. So, for example, you might write, "Looking for family-friendly vacation," whereas now you have to go and ask for a particular part of that information.
An agent might look for "Mediterranean cruises" or a "luxury hotel in Madrid" or "adventure tours in South Africa," but they can't do it all at once.
Q: So, Xcelerator's natural language search isn't just looking for a search term?
A: We will be injecting all this data that Xcelerator will have in terms of cruise, hotel and tour. Then the agent will be able to go into that system and ask a question in natural language, and the system will be able to spit it back out.
For example, it can answer a question about family friendly, but it's not looking for the search terms. You have a hotel that might have a pool. It might have a kids club. But if you were looking at the search terms, it doesn't say "family friendly." But we've created this technology that says, "kids clubs; that's related to family friendly." It thinks like a human would.
Q: How much detail can IBM-Watson and WayBlazer technology bring to the itinerary creation process?
A: One example is perhaps you use an agent who is well versed in the Caribbean. You've used that agent, and now you say, "We want to go to Europe or Asia." Perhaps that agent doesn't have the expertise with Europe and Asia that they have in the Caribbean.
This system will allow the agent to be able to become an expert on a much greater area of the world than they might have otherwise. The way it will do that is if you look at the client's trip to the Caribbean, you could use that info, and you can go into the system and use some of those things that they liked from the Caribbean trip and put it in for the new destination.
What we're saying is that an agent can put a search into the system and get many more ideas for their clients. Otherwise, they'd have to do much more exhaustive trip searches. They'd have to go to the specific countries in Asia and get those tours.
They couldn't do it across all the countries and across all the data.
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CORRECTION: Terry Jones founded Travelocity. A previous version of this Q&A erroneously stated that he founded Orbitz.