Glitches and Switches

The vision we have for this machine that we are building is that it will open up the widest range of tailored choices for the international traveler to experience South Africa. This is not an easy undertaking, as we have explained before. Personal lives and computer hardware going on the blink add to our list of problem solving tasks as we endeavor to get the website ready for its launch in a few weeks time. We are realizing the value of teamwork and team building. It has become necessary to get another mind on board and we are in the process of finding a person who has the right one. They will need to work under pressure and design their own schedule to an extent. They will have to be young, vibrant and able to occasionally rescue their personal belongings from the dog. They will also have to have a kind of higher- order cognition, enabling them to envision what anyone out of a full spectrum of international travelers might possibly want from a visit to South Africa, and help them find it, before they've even started looking.

This is why we have been so busy with our database. Gradually, it is filling up with bits of information that represent places and potential experiences. Kind of like an hourglass in reverse, the dream machine we are building will facilitate unforgettable moments in the future for people we have never met. We hope that they will go home enriched by our land and tell their friends about how it all started; with just a few simple mouse clicks.

It all sounds very easy, but we must remember that travelers are people who have chosen to leave their comfort zones. For that reason, they are at least slightly removed from the set of social norms which help them assimilate their experiences. To us, it seems that travelers experience things on a deeper level than those who don't get out much. We can't pretend that the problems we experience as South Africans go unnoticed by international visitors. It may be that negative incidents leave a more lasting impression on them than they would on a resident, or even a different kind of impression, one which residents might find it hard to relate to.
We have thought about this issue and realized that we are in a position to assist visitors who would otherwise have no one to turn to in the unlikely event of stumbling across one of the less pleasant aspects of South African life. This is why part of our machine's functionality, its human face, is a Premium Assistance Line - a hotline for users to contact us for help of any kind. This means anything from helping them to find their favorite brand of toothpaste or a good Portuguese restaurant, to coordinating a response to an emergency.

Facing challenges is a great way of developing the repertoire for overcoming new challenges, and we are happily dealing with the ones we have now, knowing that we are equipping ourselves to deal better with future ones. We are resolving the challenges we have taken upon ourselves so that the experience of traveling is burdened by as few problems as possible and the deep experiences users are left with are positive and memorable ones.

Challenges

The challenges just stepped up a notch today. With our date for coming online around the corner we are starting to realize just how much work we still have left. We are now in the phase of designing and determining how the intelligent aspects of our machine will work. We started by designing our own imaginary itineraries, as if we were potential visitors to South Africa who had no idea about where to find the things we were interested in. Through this exercise we determined the potential needs of the user and established how the machine would go about grouping and sorting points of interest according to the user's interests.

While this is going on, we are still soldiering on, adding new places to stay and finding out from social networks the grooviest nightspots for visitors who don't just want to have fun in the daytime.
We may be busy but our office is never boring. A recalcitrant dog and a steady stream of international visitors from the couch surfing network keep us on our toes when we aren't building the database and going on virtual fact finding missions.

Big Words

Why does English use such big words for such simple things? We were trying to find alternatives to "accommodation establishments" and wondering why such a simple concept required nine syllables. It might have something to do with the perceived need of making such places sound fancy, but then the same words can be used for a top hotel as for a bush tent in a game reserve.

We are experiencing the word-intensiveness of this theme as Talia builds as many places to stay as she can into our site. There are six different types of accommodation, namely backpackers, guest house, hotel, resort, safari lodge and camp site. Each place needs eight different categories to describe it. These are the name, star grading, type, room description, address, latitude and longitude location, rates and images. Through these descriptions users will be able to find a place to stay that is suited to them and also close to the attractions that are aligned to their particular interests.

Some things are quick and easy and some slow and difficult in the building of this dream machine. We are doing the difficult stuff so the user doesn't have to. It feels like we're designing a special kind of lego. The user can build their creation in virtual time and space and then see it come to life as each brick becomes an experience, snugly fitting in with the ones around it. When an idea becomes a direct experience, there is no need for lengthy words. We aim to facilitate moments so special that not even lengthy words can describe them.

The Early Days

Starting as an idea many years ago, forgotten, superseded by other ideas and then allowed to flourish as time and circumstance conspired, we started building a dream machine. It takes the form of a web 2.0 platform through which users can choose from a list of real opportunities they want to experience, based on what fascinates them most. Our machine is almost ready. When it is born, like everything else, it will be in its infancy, and from there it can only grow.

We come from Cape Town, right in the southern corner of Africa. The first country our machine will run in will be ours. It will help to demonstrate to the rest of the world what a rich and complex land South Africa is, and will give clues to help uncover some of her best kept secrets. Our mission is to send the right people to the right places so that they can live their dreams, and even the dreams they never knew they had. Our database presently holds in excess of eight thousand points of interest which can be matched with the user's interests and places they plan to travel, providing them with an optimized itinerary for their time in our beautiful country.

Building this dream machine is a formidable task, but it is being dutifully undertaken by a dedicated team. We are going through what the country has to offer with a fine toothed comb, finding exactly where each interesting thing is so that users can locate them on a map with a single click. We are painstakingly designing and redesigning our site to maximize efficiency and user-friendliness. We are constantly diversifying, adapting and evolving so that our machine lives up to its name: Ultimate Holiday Planner.com