lastminute.com shortlisted in the Innovation Award - Globe Travel Awards 2009

lastminute.com has been twice shortlisted in the Innovation Award - Globe Travel Awards 2009 for its revolutionary fonefood application and its nifty one-box search pronto.

fonefood allows mobile users to search for and book restaurants from their phones free of charge. fonefood covers more than 6,000 restaurants in 12 countries.

pronto is one simple box where you enter what you need. e.g. you can enter things like “Paris on Friday”, “I’d like a 5 star hotel on 10 November in Gran Canaria for 3 nights”.

Last week, fonefood scooped Innovation in Multi-Channel Marketing Award in the inaugural e-consultancy Awards and is shortlisted in the Retail Business Show Awards 2009.

The Globe Travel Awards 2009, run by leading travel trade title Travel Weekly, take place on January 27th.

For further information on fonefood visit:
http://m.lastminute.com/fonefood

http://labs.lastminute.com/fonefood/

For further information on pronto visit:
http://pronto.lastminute.com/

http://labs.lastminute.com/projects/pronto

To find out more about the Globe Travel Awards 2009 visit:

http://www.globetravelawards.co.uk/

For the full list of e-consultancy awards winners visit:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/awards/winners.asp

lastminute.com unveils revolutionary search tool pronto

lastminute.com is revolutionising the online travel industry with its unique sentence search tool pronto.

pronto is a one box search function that allows the construction of a sentence to search for travel and leisure options, for example ‘Paris on Friday’, ‘I would like a 5 star hotel on 10 November in Gran Canaria for 3 nights’, ‘table for two in Covent Garden this evening’.

pronto is the customer-friendly alternative to the traditional drop down box search system used by all online travel providers including lastminute.com.

The lastminute.com homepage has a total of 78 search boxes across its ten travel and leisure product tabs including hotels, flights and theatre. Including the ‘advance search facility’ there are a total of 162 search boxes.

pronto, which is launching this week to co-inside with lastminute.com’s 10th birthday, allows customers to search for their leisure requirements across all categories using just the one box. The system launches covering hotels, flights and restaurants.

pronto was developed following intensive research that uncovered people newer to online travel sites do not have the patience to fill in all the different boxes.

These people find traditional online travel sites cluttered and the standard search process hard work.

Following these findings seven alternative search prototypes were developed and tested with customers.

These included a circular ‘polo search’ function with options appearing as your mouse sweeps around a circle, and a large intricate drawing showing all kinds of trips and holidays, with the ability to zoom around and choose visually.

pronto received the most positive feedback as participants found it a friendly and inspiring way to search for travel and leisure experiences by typing in what they wanted rather than filling in big forms.

lastminute.com Head of Innovation Marko Balabanovic said: “The search engines have made the one box search system the standard way to search for information online, so it makes sense that travel and leisure products should be searched for in the same way.

“Innovation has been at the heart of lastminute.com since its launch in 1998. pronto makes its even easy for the consumer to make the most of their leisure time, which is exactly what lastminute.com has stood for over the past 10 years.”

pronto has a patent pending on its search functionality.

To experience pronto visit http://www.lastminute.com/pronto