DoHop travel search engine : interview de Frosti Sigurjonsson, General Manager de DoHop
Les meta-moteurs de recherche de voyages (travel search engine) sont en constante progression dans l'environnement e-tourisme.
Ils vous facilitent la vie en recherchant automatiquement les informations auprès de divers fournisseurs de voyages comme je l'ai expliqué dans un de mes derniers post ICI.
Aujourd'hui je vous propose un interview de Frosti Sigurjonsson, General Manager de DoHop, un travel search engine avec une spécialisation sur les vols low cost et qui est promis à un bel avenir grâce à sa technologie, sa simplicité d'utilisation et son efficacité en terme de rapidité de réponse aux requêtes de recherche.
Frosti, can you tell us the story and some information about you and your team ?
FS: The story begins on a icy cold December night in Reykjavik, Iceland when I was searching for a flight to Nice. As you may know, there are no direct flights between Reykjavik and Nice so I visited the websites of EasyJet, IcelandExpress, RyanAir, Sterling and wrote down the timetable information trying to put together a travel plan that would work out for my travel dates. It was very complicated and rather frustrating not to find anything. There had to be an easier way. So I started looking for online search tools. But to my great surprise, I could not find any website that would solve this task. There was clearly a need for a search engine that would help people plan connection flights with low-cost airlines.
After more research a team of software engineers was established to see if this task could be solved. To be honest, it took a much greater effort than any of us had expected but in the end this fantastic team of engineers overcame all the challenges and dohop.com was born.
What is the story of the brand name DoHop ? seem funny !
FS: Finding a name is always difficult. In this case the goal was to find a short name/URL with a dot com ending. We never found any usable 3 or 4 letter names, so we moved on to 5 letter names. It seemed that any name we could think of had already been reserved by someone else. In the end we came up with dohop.com and it was available. We then checked to make sure that it did not mean anything rude in different languages like french, chinese or hindi. All was fine so we were named dohop.com and turned our attention to more important tasks – like developing the search engine.
What is the main difference between DoHop and the other travel search engine like : Kayak, Mobissimo and other ?
FS: dohop.com searches both low-cost and network airlines. It focuses on finding the best route between any given destinations and will combine the flights of any airline to find the best route for the user.
dohop.com also knows that it is possible to drive between some airports like Stanstead and Luton and will use that information to solve a difficult travel problem if needed.
dohop's main goal is to help the user to find all possible routes, select the best route and finally help the user find the best price for this route.
Most other search engines are designed to find the lowest prices for popular routes while dohop.com was designed to help people find solutions for complicated routes as well.Do you plan to extend your DoHop destinations.
FS: Next week we will increase the number of airlines from 80 to 660 with destinations all around the world. We will then be adding more features on regular basis to make our search engine more useful.
I see you also you plan to translate in french, an idea when it will be available ?
FS: We hope to complete the french version in January.
What about RSS for alert and special offer ? FS: We will be looking into RSS and deal alerts of various kinds, but I guess it will have wait until we have the french version up and running.
Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0, what do you think about this evolution in the tourism market place ? FS: I must confess that I am not sure what Web 2.0 stands for and I totally missed what Web 1.0 was so I better not comment on either of them. What I do know is that travel has now become the largest online commerce with a estimated worldwide sales of $100 billion in 2005. And even if travel companies were very late to start using the internet they are now giving the Internet a very high strategic importance. We can therefore expect the travel trade to become early movers in adopting all the latest internet technologies – such as the Web 2.0 – although I still don't know what it means.
You have the micro !!!
FS: I hope that your readers will find dohop.com helpful in planning their trips. And I would like to ask them to tell all their best friends about dohop.com so they don't have to spend their winter evenings in frustration trying to plan their flights the hard way, like I did.
Allez donc essayer DoHop, un vrai gain de temps pour vos recherches sur les low cost en Europe 
P.S : le post traduit en français arrive bientôt !