Our New Travel Planner at www.GoVermont.com
April 30th, 2008 by Walter
We launched a new edition of www.GoVermont.com last week. This is a reinvention of the Vermont Travel Planner that I originally created in 1995. It has been very popular in the past and also provided lodging content to the State of Vermont through their skiing websites for many years (on www.SkiVermont.com).
This new edition of GoVermont receives its lodging listings from Travelocity via their Web Service, so data is passed to us in XML where we integrate into our look and feel. We also obtain events from the State of Vermont and integrate our own database of golf courses, ski and resort information, attractions, town information and more. This allows us to provide a true travel planning experience for the visitor—with value-add over the same listings a visitor would see on Travelocity, as an example. Yet the lodging rates are the same, and we receive a nice commission on any lodging bookings made on our site.
We developed a number of new features that are worthy of mentioning. For one, a lot of the site is driven by Ajax, so menus and data fields build on the fly based on user input. Lodging listings also build via Ajax, so the user can page forward through listings without having to wait for page redraws.
Here is one neat feature, which we call MapIt!, developed by John Peloquin, a programmer on staff here. Click on the following links which interact with Google Maps:
John wrote about this feature and shares the code in his blog at blogs.whardy.com/john.
There is a lot more in the works for this site. So stay tuned for enhanced features that will make travel planning even better soon. We’re also porting this technology into our sister site, www.GoNewYork.com!
To read more, please see our press release: W. Hardy Interactive Launches Innovative Vermont Vacation Travel Planner.
