Owner: OFF2 Travel Blog URL:http://blog.off2.com Join Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:59:23 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The OFF2 blog gives you travel information about the site OFF2.com. Soon to involve special offers on package holidays, hotels, car hire and much more! Site statistics:Click here
World Travel Market 2007 2007-09-20 04:47:47 OFF2 will be attending the WorldTravelMarket
2007 in November. Staged annually in London under one roof, World Travel Market is a must attend, business to business exhibition. WTM provides a unique opportunity for the whole global travel trade industry to meet, network, negotiate, conduct business and stay abreast with the latest developments in the travel industry. For the obvious reasons stated above, we will be mixing it up with all of our colleagues and competitors, and hopefully coming away with new partnerships and ideas as well as loads of free stuff!
Whoo Whoo!! 2007-09-20 04:43:45 OFF2 have been granted a International Air Transport Asscociation Licence (IATA) today!! This is fantastic news for us, and enables OFF2 to sell and trade flights anywhere in the world. This application has been processing for over a year now, and its arrival will allow us to ramp up production significantly in the run up to our launch.
Press Release - New Travel Networking Commerce Site Launches Pre Registration 2007-09-14 06:59:28 The online travel industry is gearing up for a new player in its market today as OFF2.COM launched their online pre registration for the first 50,000 users.
For a limited time only the website is offering bonuses and benefits to users who pre register with OFF2.COM. We have only allowed a limited number of 50,000 pre registration spaces for the initial rollout phase.
Based in England, this innovative team has developed a new web 2.0 based Travel
website over the past 14 months. The site itself is based on enterprise level award winning software in the form of IBM Websphere Commerce coupled with an extensive number of PHP databases creating a social networking site for travellers. The site will offer users the ability to interact with one another by sharing travel information, sharing holiday snaps, recommending destinations and reviewing events, allowing members to increase their stature and rewarding them for their site usage.
The site itself generates its data from the Read more:Release
, Registration
, Press
, Press Release
Pre Registration opening shortly! 2007-09-10 16:25:25 As promised we are opening a limited number of spaces for pre registration for the site launch, as a pre registered user were going to give you a little bit back, its only fair really isnt it!.
Were currently working on a points / rewards system for users. The initial concept is that we will reward users for activity on the site, after all we want people to have an enjoyable experience and recommend it to their friends, colleagues and family. Points initially are envisaged to be rewarded for;
A Friend Joining from Referral
Any booking made - Hotel night / Flight / Holiday / Car Hire / Attraction / Events
Reviewing an Event or Establishment
Thats the initial ideas though our little thinkbox is working overtime trying to come up with more ideas so watch this space.
Details of the pre registration will be posted on Thursday 14th September so bookmark this page so as not to miss out!.
Read more:Registration
Website Flossing! 2007-09-10 10:51:44 We all know theres things in life we really dont enjoy doing but you know you just have to do them and that its good for you, in much the same way as flossing in real life, web developments equivalent is Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Having compiled the complete list of static templates for the initial launch we now go about the task of trying to optimize each and every one of them (about 176…roughly ) through internal deep linking, re-compiling meta data (title / description / keywords / H1 / H2) for this amount of pages is no quick task. Low and behold though its getting done and all credit to the team for ploughing through it!
All we need now is some incoming external links so if a webmaster out there with a nice beefy Pagerank feels nice add a link to http://www.off2.com ! Also if anyone reading this is a DMOZ editor do us a favour and accept our submission!!
Cheers
Corporate Travel Launch 2007-09-06 07:02:44 Great News!
Its here a lot earlier than we originally anticipated! Corporate Travel
is something were really keen on, we believe with the utilization of our social network it can only benefit a company to be able to make bookings and notify their staff immediately, the online diary and upcoming events will also allow each member of staff to keep on track of their business travels.
Additionally with the use of favourite networks a business travellor can make arriving in an unfamiliar city a much more pleasant experience, using the network to its full capacity will enable the user to see upcoming events, local attractions, recommended restaurants and a host more of local reviews. When travelling alone (which in business we all know isnt the best fun really) it can be a painstaking exercise. Hopefully this will add oncemore another level of interactiveness with the consumer.
If you are interested in pre registering your company for the corporate travel service (launching Dec 2007) have a Read more:Launch
IATA Inspection 2007-08-24 06:30:02 Big day of the IATA Licence inspection today!
We had a really positive meeting with IATA’s representative so fingers crossed now everything is on the way to getting our licences now (IATA & ATOL) in time for launch in November.
Read more:Inspection
A whole different approach…well we think so! 2007-07-05 10:27:01 Were changing our approach, out with the old and in with the new, so its now OFF2.0, I mean web 2.0
In a way were accepting of the delays in development now, its given us a chance to regroup and refocus our goals for the site.
Despite the thoughts of the majority on the effects and addictiveness of social networking sites our mild addiction has had an excellent positive effect on our business model and changed the way we want to do business too! (along with all the other web 2.0 companies springing up out there!)
Adding the element of Social Networking will set us out from the rest of the travel market, allowing a customer experience and customer interaction not yet seen on a commerce site. We are still figuring out the best way to incorporate the customer experience in both a social networking and commerce context, its going to be a long hard slog but the benefits far outweigh the negatives im sure you will agree!.
Some of the ideas weve had are pretty cool; allowing u Read more:different
, think
Partnership agreement with Worldspan GDS 2006-11-18 04:15:34 Great news!
This morning we signed off the contract to have full content supplied by Worldspan GDS (Global Distribution Service) this partnership will allow our website to host an amazing array of bookable data as detailed below;
Over 45,000 Bookable Hotels worldwide
Over 182 Airlines worldwide
16 Car Hire companies
As I am sure you are all aware this is great news for the site and allows us to match the big boys in the marketplace in terms of content.
The advantages of linking 2007-09-25 10:08:41 Linking between sites is what makes the World Wide Web what it is. The World Wide Web is basically one big mesh of links that connect one site to another making it easy to go from site to site finding out new information or anything of importance.
Search engines like Google have developed and have made it easy for anyone to find what they are searching for within milliseconds. To appear on Google for example then your site must be found by its crawler. A crawler is a component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically “crawling” the Web - A search engine’s “crawler” (also called a “spider” or “robot”), follows links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine’s index. To appear on a search engine you’re going to need to make it easy for the crawler to find your site. The best way to do this is to exchange links with other sites. The more links with other sit
The advantages of linking 2007-09-25 10:08:41 Linking between sites is what makes the World Wide Web what it is. The World Wide Web is basically one big mesh of links that connect one site to another making it easy to go from site to site finding out new information or anything of importance.
Search engines like Google have developed and have made it easy for anyone to find what they are searching for within milliseconds. To appear on Google for example then your site must be found by its crawler. A crawler is a component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically “crawling” the Web - A search engine’s “crawler” (also called a “spider” or “robot”), follows links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine’s index. To appear on a search engine you’re going to need to make it easy for the crawler to find your site. The best way to do this is to exchange links with other sites. The more links with other sit
World Travel Market 2007 2007-09-20 04:47:47 OFF2 will be attending the WorldTravelMarket
2007 in November. Staged annually in London under one roof, World Travel Market is a must attend, business to business exhibition. WTM provides a unique opportunity for the whole global travel trade industry to meet, network, negotiate, conduct business and stay abreast with the latest developments in the travel industry. For the obvious reasons stated above, we will be mixing it up with all of our colleagues and competitors, and hopefully coming away with new partnerships and ideas as well as loads of free stuff!
Whoo Whoo!! 2007-09-20 04:43:45 OFF2 have been granted a International Air Transport Asscociation Licence (IATA) today!! This is fantastic news for us, and enables OFF2 to sell and trade flights anywhere in the world. This application has been processing for over a year now, and its arrival will allow us to ramp up production significantly in the run up to our launch.
Press Release - New Travel Networking Commerce Site Launches Pre Registration 2007-09-14 06:59:28 The online travel industry is gearing up for a new player in its market today as OFF2.COM launched their online pre registration for the first 50,000 users.
For a limited time only the website is offering bonuses and benefits to users who pre register with OFF2.COM. We have only allowed a limited number of 50,000 pre registration spaces for the initial rollout phase.
Based in England, this innovative team has developed a new web 2.0 based Travel
website over the past 14 months. The site itself is based on enterprise level award winning software in the form of IBM Websphere Commerce coupled with an extensive number of PHP databases creating a social networking site for travellers. The site will offer users the ability to interact with one another by sharing travel information, sharing holiday snaps, recommending destinations and reviewing events, allowing members to increase their stature and rewarding them for their site usage.
The site itself generates its data from the Worlds Read more:Registration
, Press
, Release
, Press Release
Pre Registration opening shortly! 2007-09-10 16:25:25 As promised we are opening a limited number of spaces for pre registration for the site launch, as a pre registered user were going to give you a little bit back, its only fair really isnt it!.
Were currently working on a points / rewards system for users. The initial concept is that we will reward users for activity on the site, after all we want people to have an enjoyable experience and recommend it to their friends, colleagues and family. Points initially are envisaged to be rewarded for;
A Friend Joining from Referral
Any booking made - Hotel night / Flight / Holiday / Car Hire / Attraction / Events
Reviewing an Event or Establishment
Thats the initial ideas though our little thinkbox is working overtime trying to come up with more ideas so watch this space.
Details of the pre registration will be posted on Thursday 14th September so bookmark this page so as not to miss out!.
Read more:Registration
Website Flossing! 2007-09-10 10:51:44 We all know theres things in life we really dont enjoy doing but you know you just have to do them and that its good for you, in much the same way as flossing in real life, web developments equivalent is Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Having compiled the complete list of static templates for the initial launch we now go about the task of trying to optimize each and every one of them (about 176…roughly ) through internal deep linking, re-compiling meta data (title / description / keywords / H1 / H2) for this amount of pages is no quick task. Low and behold though its getting done and all credit to the team for ploughing through it!
All we need now is some incoming external links so if a webmaster out there with a nice beefy Pagerank feels nice add a link to http://www.off2.com ! Also if anyone reading this is a DMOZ editor do us a favour and accept our submission!!
Cheers
Corporate Travel Launch 2007-09-06 07:02:44 Great News!
Its here a lot earlier than we originally anticipated! Corporate Travel
is something were really keen on, we believe with the utilization of our social network it can only benefit a company to be able to make bookings and notify their staff immediately, the online diary and upcoming events will also allow each member of staff to keep on track of their business travels.
Additionally with the use of favourite networks a business travellor can make arriving in an unfamiliar city a much more pleasant experience, using the network to its full capacity will enable the user to see upcoming events, local attractions, recommended restaurants and a host more of local reviews. When travelling alone (which in business we all know isnt the best fun really) it can be a painstaking exercise. Hopefully this will add oncemore another level of interactiveness with the consumer.
If you are interested in pre registering your company for the corporate travel service (launching Dec 2007) have a Read more:Launch
IATA Inspection 2007-08-24 06:30:02 Big day of the IATA Licence inspection today!
We had a really positive meeting with IATA’s representative so fingers crossed now everything is on the way to getting our licences now (IATA & ATOL) in time for launch in November.
Read more:Inspection
A whole different approach…well we think so! 2007-07-05 10:27:01 Were changing our approach, out with the old and in with the new, so its now OFF2.0, I mean web 2.0
In a way were accepting of the delays in development now, its given us a chance to regroup and refocus our goals for the site.
Despite the thoughts of the majority on the effects and addictiveness of social networking sites our mild addiction has had an excellent positive effect on our business model and changed the way we want to do business too! (along with all the other web 2.0 companies springing up out there!)
Adding the element of Social Networking will set us out from the rest of the travel market, allowing a customer experience and customer interaction not yet seen on a commerce site. We are still figuring out the best way to incorporate the customer experience in both a social networking and commerce context, its going to be a long hard slog but the benefits far outweigh the negatives im sure you will agree!.
Some of the ideas weve had are pretty cool; allowing u Read more:hellip
, different
, think
Partnership agreement with Worldspan GDS 2006-11-18 04:15:34 Great news!
This morning we signed off the contract to have full content supplied by Worldspan GDS (Global Distribution Service) this partnership will allow our website to host an amazing array of bookable data as detailed below;
Over 45,000 Bookable Hotels worldwide
Over 182 Airlines worldwide
16 Car Hire companies
As I am sure you are all aware this is great news for the site and allows us to match the big boys in the marketplace in terms of content.
2nd Round Funding Sought 2007-11-14 10:31:12 Following the initial investment from Private Angel Investors we are now at early growth stage and looking to source second round funding to take the website and company onto the next phase of development.
I am currently in the process of creating and building a freshly updated business plan and prospectus for potential investors, we will be sending this out to over 700+ Venture Capital firms worldwide with a view to attaining an investor or venture capital firm that has the same vision as ourselves to develop the travel market and embrace the ethos of a true Web2.0 company.
We are looking for investment for a number of reasons; application developments, marketing and promotion (other than our numerous viral methods we are attempting!) and travel specific leveraging (ie provisioning of Hotel Rates/Rooms and Block Bookings).
Following successful funding (fingers crossed!!) we are also looking to increase our staffing levels over the forthcoming months, jobs when available will be listed Read more:Funding
New Logo here we come! 2007-11-14 07:01:57 Its very bizarre at this stage to still be quibbling over the best logo choice and as yet we still arent happy with any weve had presented, maybe were just really picky!!
In the aim of actually being able to brand our site, literature and be able to show off the new site its about time we really nailed down a definitive choice and stuck with it. To complete this task we have employed a graphics designer based in Portugal, Joao Franco. His portfolio of work is truly impressive, it can be seen here: http://www.arpad.deviantart.com/gallery/ and we cant wait to show you the new brand logo in the coming weeks.
James
So were moving then? … 2007-11-12 10:53:45 Weve finally found offices that suit our needs, after viewing over 30 offices throughout the dorset area over the past year we are on first name terms with most of the Realtors in town! We have decided on an open plan office based in the Bournemouth University Innovation Centre (www.buic.co.uk) this will provide us with excellent links to the local university giving us the potential to offer placements to Tourism and Marketing students and access to a wealth of business knowledge in the business school.
We will benefit from a nice clean open plan office allowing for us to develop site areas at a much quicker rate than other companies will find possible.
Theres also parking, close to Bournemouth Town Centre for nice lunchtime options oh and a nifting fingerpad entry system to boot!
We should complete the move by the latest 22nd November, just in time for site launch.
James Read more:hellip
Screencasts - watch them here!! 2007-11-05 10:58:45 Following the recent successes of screencasts we will be looking to film approximately 10 screencasts in time for the site launch, hopefully these short narrated movie clips will give users a clear process to follow should they find themselves in difficulty. Allied with a large breadth of answered FAQ’s, feedback forms and now narrated Screencasts we really are trying to think of the end user experience. Also given the fact we dont have a large call centre to deal with queries we really want to empower the user to be able to answer their query themselves, and if being able to watch
a screencast of processes such as ‘how to book’ ‘how to amend a booking’ ‘how to invite friends’ helps then this will aid us greatly.
Additionally we will be looking for users to contribute to new screencasts they would like to see, maybe an action or process they dont really know how to perform.
I for one will be making sure im not the one narrating!!
James
Graphics, Graphics and more Graphics! 2007-11-01 11:01:42 It is really an exciting time at the moment to start to see the graphics pages flying in by the day! Minus some minor alterations and amendments were are pretty chuffed and suitably impressed the guys have hit the nail on the head in terms of meeting our vision for the site.
In total theres about 170+ page designs required, to give you an idea about how these pages get from concept to page creation this is the process they we go through with the guys at Weblaunch…
A Page is sent over in PDF format with site template and design features specific to that page.
We then look over the page and seek amendments for functionality and graphical layout
We then send back the amendments sketched or edited in Photoshop for return
Once we have received the page back we authorise them as signed off
The pages are then sent over to the developers in Slovenia in HTML and CSS format to embed the essential booking and data code.
As you can see its quite an ardouos task for each page to be designe Read more:Graphics
Slovenian Travels! 2007-10-25 06:35:30 Weve just got back from our central European travels!
A breathtaking country, and so clean.
It was really good for us to finally meet our development team in person rather than Skype, Email and Yahoo Messanger! After two solid days of thrashing out development issues, problems and all things OFF2 we managed to really clarify our goals and functionality requirements. Seeing first hand working queries on Hotel searches, Poer Shopper Flight Searches and Car calls to Worldspan at lightning speeds really made the trip worthwhile. Previous testing issues in our initial developments returned search results of anywhere between 7.5 - 12 seconds for a hotel, with Michael at the ready armed with a mobile phone stopwatch we were pleasantly surprised to see returned booking results of between 3 - 7 seconds on average :). Excellent news and well inline with our competitors results, actually a little bit quicker! Which the praise can only go to Gregor for building all the Java classes so efficien Read more:Slovenian
, Travels
OFF2 Slovenia 2007-10-18 06:51:25 OFF2 Slovenia
….
Quite like the ring to the name on that title, seems the chosen brand name works well with any name added at the end!!
So were off to slovenia next week on an Easyjet flight to Ljubijana for 2 nights to meet our developers, see the site in action and iron out any queries or potential problems. This is really exciting for us as it will be the first time we have seen a working model of the site and see results returned via the Worldspan XML interface. We are also really keen to see the Powershopper functions in action for flights and see how much more potential this will give us.
This really is a busy old time at the moment for us, signing off and amending graphics by the page and making sure we get this site perfect for the end user experience.
See ya when we get back!
James
Current Site Updates 2007-11-27 06:20:50 Things are coming along well with development, good news for all!
Page designs are flying in - literally! (India!) we now have the full mockups and HTML templates for all of AIR / Car / Hotel / Restaurants and Activities, these include search results, product detail pages and all category headers. We are now entering the creation stage of all final pages; footer pages (About / Privacy / Contact / Jobs etc etc) Cart pages and user account pages. Added to this the guys at Weblaunch are working round the clock to finish off the social networking pages and the customisation of these to our brand and fit.
In terms of site development following our telecon with the Mediasoft guys in Slovenia yesterday we now know what is complete and what is still pending, all commerce functionality is now complete including server setup to production servers from development, HTML pages that have been supplied have been embedded within the JSP pages and bookings are being completed from start to finish via Read more:Current
Corporate Travel Launch 2007-12-18 09:03:21 Today we launched our Corporate Travel
channel, the initial interest following the first full day of marketing has overwhelmed us! With 6 scheduled meetings in the first week of January already things are looking very promising!
With an initial phase 1 target of 120 client signups over the forthcoming 3 months we are keen to start the ball rolling. Offering clients access to negotiated rates on Air / Hotel and Car plus additional concierge facilities such as restaurant and event bookings allied with our extremely competitive monthly flat rate pricing strategy we are very confident we can acheive this goal.
Should you know of anyone who has the difficult role of booking travel on behalf of their company and think they might need a helping hand please contact Harry at harry@off2.com.
James Read more:Launch
New Logo… Finally 2007-12-14 08:44:26 After many mockups and designs we have finally decided on our definitive logo. The breif to the graphics designer was to create a logo which was vibrant, memorable and simplistic. We wanted the logo to represent ourselves and our ethos, to use travel as the basis and look to other web 2.0 logos for inspiration.
The new logo is shown below, we especially love it on a black background!
James
(Click to enlarge) Read more:Finally
, hellip
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