Mobissimo releases Activity Search

Thanks to VerticalSearch.net, I noticed today that Mobissimo has added an Activity Search.  Mobissmo does an excellent job of keeping on the cutting edge: they're the only travel search engine (TSE) with a blog, they pioneered the One Box Search, and MobiCombo does some neat things by combining fares from different airlines.  Of course, to create all of these neat features, they've sacrificed on the user interface side: SideStep, Kayak, and even FareChase all offer superior filtering capabilities.  Activity Search is much like their previous features: whereas the spirit of the offering is good, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

Activity Search Homepage

From the homepage, you can select your origin, choose an activity type, supplemented by a keyword.  So far, so good, although I bet user testing would have shown that users didn't understand what the "keyword" box means.  I assume that it's to narrow down your results, but I bet people type in the darndest things.

Activity Search Intermediate Page

Once you press enter, you get a page like this.  It shows you wine tasting destinations from around the world and what regions are nearby.  Clearly there are some serious problems with data, as "Cleveland, USA" is the choice for the Niagara Valley, even though both Buffalo, Rochester, and Toronto are much closer.  Also, both San Francisco and Oakland show up for Sonoma/Napa.  A user from JFK might not know that these airports are right across the Bay from each other.  It would have been nice if I could have used something to narrow down my choices.  For example, I'd like to see wine regions only in the United States.  Or, I might only want to see beaches in South America.  Such a long list, especially with bad/repeated data, suggests that I'm still going to have to look somewhere else to supplement my data.

Activity Search Results Page

 

Now this is cool!  Mobissimo is the only TSE that will display results to multiple destinations simultaneously!  Of course, I can't filter out the results, so the result list is completely unwieldy--it was bad enough with one location, let alone three different metro areas!

So, is my life any better than this, being a wino from the East Coast?  I don't think so.  I probably know where all of the top wine tasting locations are.  What I don't probably know is: what are the nearby cities, what are the good hotels to stay in, should I rent a car, are there other cool activities like balloon rides I should look at, do I need to book tastings at my favorite wineries in advance?  All Mobissimo has done is given a glorified list of activities associated with locations.  The real challenge is to build an activity trip around the air, hotel, and car.  A true activity search would show travelers what they can actual do in a region and suggest activities.

Now, I do think that there is some value to the social aspect of activities tagging, especially for the long tail (did you know that there are lots of wineries popping up in Minnesota?)   However, in order to make it truly useful, Mobissimo would have to build other community features to allow users to share stories, reviews, etc.

In the end, Mobissimo's heart was in the right place: it's very difficult for users to find the right kind of information they need when they only have a general idea of where to go (e.g. "I want to go somewhere warm in February and I only want to spend $2000.")  The travel search company that gets it right will be the one that looks at user problems on a high level and drills down into applications that solve specific component problems.  I disagree with Brian Smith: we're still a long, long way from having someone developing a true online travel agent.

And finally, I have to ask: what's the deal with the sperm in the Mobissimo Logo? =)

s

Comments

[mark]

Do you really like one box search? Can you think of a site where it works well when there is a clear context for certain input (like travel or local search). Users have trouble entering 1 input field correctly - munging 4 fields together seems like a mess to me.

[theMike]

Very cool tool, and there's nothing wrong with it, the software just likes Cleveland better than the other choices, that's all.

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