As EAN’s CTO and VP of Product, Eachan Fletcher sees it, online travel agents want to get more human and a human travel agent wants to get more online and this new tool which it callsIntelligent Query is one step closer towards blending the two.

Now in beta and to be rolled out towards year end, EANIQ is what he calls “unconstrained search” and it uses voice recognition and machine learning “to figure out the things people ask a travel agent and provides the answers.”

He calls it “a leapfrog” in search and the biggest thing EAN has done in the two years since he joined the Expedia-owned B2B company.

“In the last couple of years, we have released a lot of things, sort order, merchandising, smart cross-sell, last room availability, urgency, geography – each one has made a difference but this is a leapfrog in the industry.

“It uses semantics and machine reasoning to understand the intent behind a sentence to find your best options and generates additional follow-up questions to narrow down your results, and counter proposes.”

According to the website, “EANIQ (formerly Geography Smart Search) expands and simplifies the EAN API Geo Function to incorporate predictive as-you-type search, location disambiguation pages, and a heavy emphasis natural language processing capabilities.

“Rather than typing a destination, clicking dates on a calendar, and ticking off amenity checkboxes, customers can simply type a phrase such as “Hotel with a pool with room for my wife and 2 kids for the summer in Rome” and EANIQ will detect the desired dates, amenities, occupancy, location, etc.”

Acknowledging that people do find it hard to ask the right questions, he said, “Most people start with a wish, idea and intention – the point of IQ is to look for the intent behind phrases.”

Initially available in English and targeted at the US and UK markets, IQ will offer international options and local context – for example, school holidays in Hong Kong. Other language versions will be developed with Fletcher saying, “This is eminently achievable.”

EANIQ will be made available as part of the value set of APIs made available by EAN to its partners and would benefit traditional travel agents wanting to blend online with offline and start-ups wanting to start a travel business, said Fletcher.

Fletcher, who comes from the sports industry where he worked on technologies to help bookies price matches, said EAN’s role is to help suppliers find travellers and put them together with the right trips and prices. “Our role is to help other travel brands be as successful as our own brands.”

Asked why they would do that, he said, “Competition is good for the customer. There are many thousands of businesses out there making travel products for the consumer and they’re going to do it anyway. If we participate in the ecosystem with the right platform and right content, we can help drive travel growth and be part of the success.”

The New Zealand-born Fletcher said he came into EAN with the mission of helping “EAN complete the transformation from being a simple affiliate scheme to a complete platform and service for travel brands.”

“Demands are increasing, the richness of data – the bar for what makes a compelling successful web experience is always going up. A few years ago, we had no maps, reviews, ratings. If you want to run a successful website, with the breadth and depth of data out there, the kind of features that you need are increasing.”

He said the current landscape favours people who can leverage data and technology and Expedia, being a US$50 billion company, can afford to invest in breakthrough technology and products.

As he sees it, the largest problem and opportunity in travel is putting the agency back into web travel – ie putting the “A” into the OTA.

“In Asia, about 80% of travel is offline and there’s a trend towards that demand going online so there is a need for more sophisticated tools. What we haven’t solved as an industry is the agency experience online. When you use an OTA, it’s basically the consumer version of the same tools that a travel agent has but you’re not getting the experience of the engagement with a travel agent.

“The longterm opportunity is for travel agency websites to be smarter to figure out the sort of holiday I want – a retail website that uses Artificial Intelligence, semantics and machine learning to understand more natural phrases from people and turn that into meaningful advice.”

Referring to this article – http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130517164129-48342529-how-will-adding-intelligence-to-everyday-things-change-your-world, he said, “Products everywhere are becoming more intelligent – if a soda machine can give me better service by profiling me and customising its responses, why shouldn’t travel sites?”

He believes that in five years time, online travel will be revolutionized with new and improved technology such as Siri and Google Glass.

“Look at how far search has come from Alta Vista days. Search engines are starting to understand intent and problems and becoming better at getting to the root of what I am looking for.”

With the convergence of mobile and the web, Fletcher said it’s an exciting time to be a developer. “In the past, you built a website. Today, you have to build an experience – and it has to be pervasive and adaptable across a range of devices that people are using to consume content.”

And the developers who will succeed will be those “who understand experience from a user point of view and who can make things beautiful and useful, information rich without being cluttered and know what to leave behind and what to carry forward between screen types – in others words, someone who can take complexity and make it simple.”