curious and curiouser

PlanetEye Applies Pack Rat Mentality to Travel Planning

Posted: 20 Sep 2008 01:13 PM PDT

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.