Yahoo Offers New Vacation Planning Tools

Yahoo Inc. has publicly launched its Trip Planner, a research tool that allows users to create their travel guides and itineraries and share their experiences online.

Yahoo Travel and MasterCard are promoting the launch through a Great Trip Planner Ticket Giveaway. MasterCard will provide two free airline tickets each day in a sweepstakes for entrants who display their trip plans.

Yahoo released a Beta version of its Trip Planner in October 2005. Users can document their travels with photos, journals, ratings, reviews and interactive maps. Yahoo Travel has already archived 20,000 publicly shared records, allowing users to consult interactive pages when planning their vacations or business trips.

Yahoo Trip has several new features, including personalized formats for journals with text and photos and simple search functions to help find others' journal entries for help with planning. It also has an interactive map with top trip plans, as well as pan and zoom technology. Yahoo Network Integration offers search integration, travel guides and FareChase.

Other new features include Web clipping and tagging, a recommendation engine from Yahoo Travel Guides, printing options, community feedback and collaborative editing capabilities.Jasper Malcolmson, director of Yahoo Travel, said in a statement released Monday that Trip Planner is part of the company's focus on social search and media.

"Just as other Yahoo social search products like Flickr, Yahoo Answers, del.icio.us, and MyWeb have created a platform for sharing information between users, Trip Planner is about offering a way for travelers to benefit from sharing their travel experiences," he said.