Alan Buxton’s e-Sourcing Place

Now this is cool.

Taking the Expedia/Kayak thing to a whole new level is InsideTrip.

It is a travel site that uses non-price attributes to work out the overall quality of your plane trip, including such elements as leg room, travel duration, gate location etc. Read more at TechCrunch.

OK, so there’s no dynamic negotiation going on amongst the airlines on the site (yet). But the idea of factoring in non-price attributes into an online shopping site is the same thing we do in the B2B space with factoring non-price attributes into sourcing decisions. Though we don’t do enough of it.

I tried out the site with my next Chicago trip. It gives British Airways a higher score than American (definitely agree on that). But gives Virgin the same kind of score as American – though I have heard that Virgin is better than BA. As it happens I’m breaking a long-time BA habit to go with Virgin this time round so will see for myself whether their rating algorithm works for me.

But even if it doesn’t – that’s not a big deal. This is only the second such application I’ve come across. The other one was a hotel-booking site (which I can’t unfortunately find my reference for). The hotel application struck me as overly academic. But InsideTrip is a more exciting consumer-driven usage of multi attribute concepts, and demonstrates how straightforward and intuitive multi attribute buying can be made. More consumer-driven lessons for the B2B industry.