We're not there yet, and we won't be for a while. But there are a few Web sites to watch that provide rudimentary clues about where things might be heading. Last time I mentioned ITA Software , which has become a darling of travel writers. The service grew out of a student project started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and it applies artificial intelligence to the task of searching individual airline databases and the massive Global Distribution Systems the airlines use to communicate with travel agents. The key advantage from a traveler's point of view is ITA's flexibility.
Travelers have a nearly unlimited ability to define what they want to search for.
ITA takes this into consideration when presenting results. Visitors fill out a questionnaire about themselves and their travel desires, and VacationCoach returns a list of Web sites outlining appropriate vacations. The sites were all chosen by VacationCoach staffers and reside in a database used by the site. But to determine how to respond to specific queries, VacationCoach studied how travel experts answer similar questions. From this study, they developed a set of expert systems rules that VacationCoach computers apply to individual requests.