PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: Cadabra
Cadabara is a research and booking website for New Zealand. The site is based on Cadabara’s tour planning software which allows customers to search, plan, and book a variety of travel products including accommodations, car rentals, and attractions. The system includes wizard based tools that help the customer through the planning process.
I signed up for an account so that I could try the itinerary planning tools. The interface is very easy to use and nicely designed. The itinerary building tools are quite sophisticated and make logical sense. Once you choose a hotel, you can find activities that fall within the date range of your stay and in your immediate location. This makes sense and means the customer can avoid having to search for activities based on date and location criteria. The itinerary also allows you to build your trip before you actually book it. This also makes sense because it allows you to fine tune your plans before you commit to paying. The danger here, however, is that if you take too long, your accommodations or activities might not be available at booking time. I didn’t go through the booking process, so I am not sure how they are handling this particular problem.
The technology appears to be quite flexible and is being used in New Zealand as a case study (I would presume). Because of the amount of content required in the production of a site, I would be interested to know how they are handling the content and data strategy.
Questions:
1. How is the content managed? Is it imported in through 3rd parties or is it all managed by Cadabara?
2. Is the product booked in real-time through partner connections?
3. Are there plans to open the system up to more content providers for other regions?
4. This is a great example of how the system works, but the corporate site is very vague about the actual technology, how customizable it is, how much it costs, how flexible it is, etc. I would like to know more about what makes it tick.
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