Plan a trip around an anchor using Una

Many of our trips start this way — We have heard about a really interesting event to attend, a new restaurant that we want to try with friends, or we need to travel somewhere for an important work meeting. In the process of building Una, we understand that part of the challenge for trip planning is juggling among many different products and putting together the context you need, and we want to build a much more streamlined experience for you.

Let me walk you through an example. My family has heard about the hot air balloon festival in Arizona, and really wants to see.

In Una, I can create a trip and put just about any type of location as the destination. Let’s just use the location of the event as the destination.

Once the trip is created, we can also add the event venue, Westworld, to the PLAN view as a custom stop, which later becomes an important anchoring location of this trip.

Next I want to know what hotels are nearby. I would sort the selection based on star rating first. And after switching to the map view, I can see how these hotels are located relative to the location of the festival, and check out the nearby ones, especially after re-centering my map and zooming in around Westworld.

Andaz Scottsdale Resort and Bungalows seem really nice. After checking out the hotel images, and selecting a room, I finished the booking right within Una.

Now with these 2 main stops in my itinerary, I want to see what else I can do during the trip. In Una’s FIND view, you can see a dedicated place that is filled with personalized recommendations for each user, called “For you”. Right next to it, a tag says “Near your stops” means that these recommendations have already taken into account the locations of stops in my current itinerary. This tag also leads me into the map view, where I see locations of Westworld and Andaz Scottsdale Resort and Bungalows are being used to recommend options that fall in the proximity but also match my preferences.

A few of these hikes look interesting, esp. after checking the “Recommended for” screen. Even if I go through everything myself, I would usually pick something easy, kid-friendly with interesting features like views, historic sites, rivers, etc. anyway. If you are curious about how we build our personalized recommendation engine and these explainability from the model, please be sure to check out our next blog that focuses on our Machine learning technology inside Una.

Looking at the PLAN now after adding these 2 new stops, I’d use Una to optimize the route and estimate the shortest travel time, after I pick the hotel as the starting point.

At this point, I think the trip plan looks good enough. If I want to schedule a few more things, I will continue during my trip. Sometimes travel plans change, but I can always find other things to do from FIND anytime.

There you go, 3 steps to FIND and put things together, plus 1 more step to see this PLAN and feel excited!