Adding flexibility to B2C booking systems using a virtual intermediate travel agent

Today, business to consumer applications have been implemented by building front ends to the old legacy systems. In this paper we question if this is enough? Many customers going to the Web to make a booking may be flexible with regard to dates and times, where to go and even if to go. The interfaces that are offered today expect detailed and specific data and do therefore not account for this flexibility. In this paper we discuss the possibilities of retaining some of this functionality offered by the human travel agent by enhancing current Web interfaces. After presenting a background study, we will suggest interfaces that to a better degree can aid the customer in performing a booking. While we use booking as an example, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to other systems as well.