I use travel search engines all the time. Like most busy business travelers, I haven’t used a travel agent in years. And with tools like meet-0-matic, I can even solve the hardest part of the problem: finding a time that works for the concerned parties.
Finding the place is another matter. But I work in lots of situations that involve people from several cities, often several countries. So here’s a do-hickey that would really help, and I think would really be an added-value for one of that major travel engines.
I’d like to be able to get all the involved parties to register with a site, specifying their home city and perhaps a few preferences. Then, when a subset of the users need to meet, they go to the site, and register a meeting request. And the site finds a location for the meeting that optimizes the preferences (convenience, expense, nearby fun, etc.).
It’d be good for long distance relationships too (something I have far too much experience with).
How cool would that be? Clearly, it’s just an optimization problem, and a fairly complex one, given the nonlinearities in the expense of transportation, and the discrete availabilites of resources. But nothing that would be beyond the capacity of a good genetic algorithm, or similar.
Hope someone gets a roundtuit.
Track with co.mments
