Finalists in TUANZ Business Internet Awards 2007
This is pretty cool. For the last 3 years I’ve been working as the architect with the Innovations and Ventures department at Air New Zealand.
Yesterday we found out that three of our projects are finalists in the TUANZ Business Internet Awards for 2007 !
The projects are:
Grabaseat (Advertising & Marketing category)
For those of you who haven’t seen grabaseat (GAS) it is a site that has daily discounted fares sometimes as low as a dollar.
This site has been very successful, in May this year we hit 1.9 million visitors a month and the latest “grabaseat on tour” promotion run in October saw a further 30% increase in the number of visitors !
The Air New Zealand ISIS online booking engine (e-Commerce category)
This is the one I am most proud of. Its the cornerstone application developed by Innovations and Ventures.
Its the most complicated system I have every worked on, not such much the user interface (which is very cool with AJAX and the like) but the quoting and pricing engine behind it.
Coming up with a price for a plane ticket is horrendously complicated and mathematically, an unsolvable problem. ISIS not only does it but it does it incredibly fast and smoothly which is what you want in a $1billion sales channel :)
How far can I go? (Experimentation category)
One of first ideas we came up with when we started working on the ISIS engine was to turn the usual conversion with a booking engine on its head: rather then picking flights and get a price, wouldn’t it be better to pick a price and get told what was available ?
That is what How far can I go? does. Even better it has very very cool user interface where you move a price slider up and it shows you everywhere you can go for that price on a cool map zooming map and the price points for the next 6 months. Love it.
I’ll keep you posted on how we do. Hopefully we win em all !