Some Personalized Travel Sites Miss Mark by Miles

Forget Microsoft’s query, “Where do you want to go today?”

Several recently launched travel Web sites are taking a different approach. By using technology to filter and rank vacation options based on interests, preferences and budgets, they’re saying, “Here’s where you should go today.”

Personalized weather reports, stock quotes and e-mailed, airport-specific air fare alerts have been around for years, and many online travel companies already customize at least some of their content.

But the latest made-to-order sites are “targeting travelers who don’t really know what they want,” notes Krista Pappas, a travel analyst with Gomez Advisors, a Massachusetts e-commerce firm that supplies consumer ratings for a variety of online travel services.

“[The sites] are trying to act as full-fledged travel agents who can provide more resources than a simple booking tool for airlines, car rentals and hotels,” Pappas says.

Follow The Rabbit! (https://www.followtherabbit.com), for example, promises to find the “vacation destination best suited for you” by asking cyber-travelers to choose among more than 80 activities and characteristics, from scuba diving to dry, sunny weather to a desire to avoid jet lag.

At competitor VacationCoach (https://www.vacationcoach.com), users complete an extensive “passport” of likes, dislikes and specific trip preferences (type of transportation, budget range, how far from home they want to travel, etc.). VacationCoach then recommends destinations from a database of a little more than 100 possibilities (all in the U.S. for now), along with links to Web sites that can help travelers book the trip.

Other newcomers offer a similar but narrower focus. GeoPassage (https://www.geopassage.com) uses travelers’ interests to create customized tours to 15 foreign countries; EuroVacations (https://www.eurovacations.com) says it will do the same for Europe when it launches later this month.

Such sites represent a “natural evolution” from online sales of point-to-point airline tickets to cruises, tours and other more complicated vacations, says Lorraine Sileo, vice president at PhoCusWright, a Connecticut-based travel research firm.

“Travelers spending that kind of money online expect personalization, and combining a human touch with the efficiency of the Internet is the ultimate goal,” Sileo says. “But I think the jury is still out on whether you can automate that process.”

A few recent trial runs yielded mixed results.

When asked to recommend a three- to four-day trip from Washington, D.C., in late June for a couple who were “extremely sensitive” to jet lag, wanted a mild and sunny urban environment and favored such activities as shopping, architecture, dining and theater, Follow the Rabbit! came up with 15 choices, topped by New York.

No surprise there, but No. 2 on the list, Paris, would have been a stretch for a long weekend. The Manhattan destination report veered from insipid to insightful. (The latter includes this tip to Zen Buddhists: “The handsome, tightly maintained and very Japanese Dai Bosatsu New York City Center on the Upper East Side offers the Northeast’s premier Rinzai experience.”) And if that D.C. couple were motivated to make the trip to New York, they would have had to plod through a list of booking options that didn’t include Amtrak, a logical choice for a journey along the Northeast corridor.

At VacationCoach, meanwhile, a hypothetical Los Angeles-based traveler asked for a three-day getaway in July that had to include walking and sailing and would cost less than $300 per person, excluding air fare. Top choice: Texas’ Gulf Coast, followed closely by Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower and Buffalo Bill Country. Sailing in Wyoming?

These Web sites “all sound good [in theory],” says Gomez Advisors’ Pappas. “But they’re still in an infancy state.”

Electronic Explorer appears the second Sunday of every month. Laura Bly welcomes comments and questions; her e-mail address is LSBly@aol.com.