Travel ancillary services group Collinson Latitude is taking some new toys straight to the consumer market via the development of two different smartphone applications.
The company, normally known for its B2B services with such industry sectors as airlines and insurance providers, has unleashed two iPhone applications this week to iTunes, one covering trip planning and another attempting to make travel more sociable.
The first, Travelplan (costing £5.99) claims to be the only app in the marketplace that has timetable information for 750,000 scheduled flights and access to around 15,000 hotels on a directory.
The accommodation information includes details number of rooms, facilities and contact details. Users can select different elements of a trip and bundle into an itinerary.
Collinson is making great play of the offline status of the app, meaning users do not need to tap into a live data stream to access content.
Air data is provided by FlightStats.
The second app, Fly&Share, works as a trip update system so that users can notify other people in their social networks and address books when they are using a particular travel service.
The user enters the detail of a service and the app automatically sends messages at various points during a flight, for example, allowing people to learn when an aircraft has taken off or landed.
Asked why the company has developed two separate services instead of combining into a single product, an official says:
“Potentially in the future they will be, but they are two single minded products to serve different needs at different stages of the travel journey.
“There is also the logical disconnect in the middle – Travelplan allows you to identify the trip you want to take, but you haven’t booked anything yet. Fly&Share allows you to share confirmed and current travel.”
Collinson says the two apps are the first in a suite of different B2C travel products, primarily as a testing vehicle to evaluate requirements of consumers.
“What do people want? Will they use it, will they pay for it? We are also testing Apple – what are the boundaries? How much data can we put out on a phone etc, and how we connect to Facebook and Twitter.”
Cool. Nice Apps
The TravelPlan product is ancient. They had it as a desktop application and later a web application for many years. It provides essentially the same flight schedules information as mobile (and desktop) products from OAG and WorldMate have provided since 2003, so the claims above are somewhat egregious.
Did some research. Neither OAG or Worldmate (or any other corp) seems to provide travelers with flight schedules that are ‘offline’ on the iPhone. Looks like their claims are fair.