Bon voyage: Social travel planning in the enterprise

Abstract

A proliferation of travel-related web sites enable people to share their travel plans, review hotels, offer advice, and more. In this paper we study social travel planning in the enterprise. While business travelers and leisure travelers have different preferences and needs, employees may benefit from sharing information and travel plans within the enterprise. We present a study collecting the requirements for social travel from employees, detail the design principles of a social travel application in the enterprise, and present Voyage, the outcome. We evaluated Voyage based on qualitative and quantitative data and discuss the results using four perspectives: collaborative activities, social information impact, usage patterns, and sharing behavior. Employees expressed their growing satisfaction from the social information contributed by fellow employees. Moreover, we observed that Voyage shortens the reservation time, thus saving costs for the enterprise. © 2012 ACM.