PlanetEye is a Microsoft-backed travel planning site that launched earlier this year and received its first major upgrade a couple days ago.
Like other travel sites, Planeteye helps you discover activities, restaurants, and accommodations in unfamiliar destinations. And it helps to organize your favorite places and activities so you’ll know where to go and what to do on your trip.
PlanetEye’s central concept is the “Travel Pack”. Each pack corresponds to a trip, and as you browse the site you can click on the numerous “Add to Travel Pack” buttons to add cities, photos, hotels, bars, attractions, and more to your packs. It’s kind of like putting all the goods that look interesting to you in a shopping cart, except that you can go back and easily put them back on the shelf with one click of the “remove” link.
Travel packs can be kept private or shared with other PlanetEye members. The site will also recommend packs to you as you view certain cities, such as the Esquire Magazine’s Best New Restaurants, 2007 travel pack when looking at San Francisco. You can choose to take individual items from these packs and add them to your own, or claim the entire pack.
As a result of this week’s site upgrade, PlanetEye will now recommend travel items to you based on those you’ve already put in your packs. The integrated maps functionality has been improved for viewing photos, lodging, dining, activities, and attractions from a particular region all at once. And an improved search box provides suggestions in a dropdown menu for more effective results.
PlanetEye has also picked up Venere.com as a hotel booking partner. Through its various means of aggregation, the site now provides information about 111,000+ hotels, 242,000+ restaurants, and 36,000+ attractions.
Also see GoPlanit, which launched recently at TechCrunch50.
That is very good engine for travel planning. I should try to include some on my website, and this will be very useful. PlanetEye is offering pretty good things I think.
I should thanks to the webmaster about this tool.
I tried some searches for cities in the US and didn’t get the correct result
Shopping cart for your traveling needs. Nicely done! Another ASP.NET site.
totally redundant and useless site. Their Alexa ranking is pathetic and there’s no way a site like this will be able to compete in this hugely competitive market.
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Thanks
Greg
Stop Spamming please!
Good call Venkat. Who teaches these morons to get PR from blog comments?
This is u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-e! YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!!!
Weak!
Can’t get past the first step…city searching seems completely broken. I’ve been using GoPlanit for the past week and the main guy there seems very responsive to the few bugs I’ve found. I tried tripit too (which is a bit more polished but lacking the social features and “yelp-like” functions of goplanit.
Has anyone found a great trip planning service yet? Benzo mentions that this is a crowded space, but I haven’t seen any clear winners…which makes me think that there’s room for more competition. Goplanit has the most features so far, but they’re still very beta. Meanwhile, VCs are still backing YouTube wannabes…talk about a crowded space…
Ian,
Sorry to hear you had problems with using PlanetEye. We’ve made some good strides in search, and working on making it even better.
While the new design is exciting, we realize there’s lot of room for improvement so if you have suggestions, comments, bugs to report, etc, please let me know.
Mark
mark@planeteye.com