FORT LAUDERDALE — A program that converts the natural language people use to type online travel requests won the DEMO Award for the Most Game-Changing Travel Innovation at PhoCusWright’s annual Travel Innovation Summit.
Evature, an Israel-based company, created the product, which is being marketed to online travel agencies.
Its founder, Barry Volinskey, used as an example the statement, “I want to go from Moscow to New York next Monday.” The program can convert that typed phrase into an XML query that search engines can use to produce flight and hotel results.
“Search engines simply don’t understand travel language,” Volinskey said during his presentation.
Evature, he explained, understands queries as vague as “I want to go someplace warm the first week in January.”
Evature was just short of a sweep in its categories, also winning the award for Travel Innovation in the International Category and chosen as the runner-up in award for the Travel Innovation in the Emerging Category.
“This is just what the travel industry needs,” said Gene Quinn, CEO of Tnooz, one of the four members of a Critics Circle that provided commentary and asked questions. (A separate panel of 11 judged the innovations.)
“Natural language in search has implications for search engines, for voice-recognition mobile apps, so what I saw was an attempt for them to solve a big hairy problem in travel, and that’s to make the finding of what you want occur in the way you think and speak, as opposed to using structures that other people tell you that you have to use,” Quinn said. “This represents what true innovation should be.”
Follow Johanna Jainchill on Twitter @jjainchilltw.