Interactive visualisation of a travel itinerary

We demonstrate a graphic visualisation of a travel itinerary, with special emphasis on time and time zones. A traditional itinerary is a text document, detailing locations, and arrival and departure times for travel and accommodation. It is usually written in diary form, showing the sequence of events to be followed on a trip. Many questions can be answered easily from such an itinerary. What time should the traveler check in at the airport? Which country are they visiting on a particular date? Other questions can be more difficult to answer. How long is the first flight? What time is it at home when the traveler reaches their hotel? The written form is also quite poor at providing a 'picture' of an entire trip. The reader cannot tell at a glance how many countries are being visited, or whether the stay in England is longer than the slay in France. The visualisation discussed here attempts to make answering such questions relatively simple. Usability studies are described which show the advantages of our visualisation.

Negotiation between the traveler and a travel agent are implicit in the development of a travel itinerary. The visualisation has been developed as part of our “Collaborative Information Gathering” project, whose overall goal is to investigate ways of supporting information search and document creation. The travel system covers the search aspect by supporting collaborative World Wide Web browsing, and document creation by supporting multiple complementary views of the trip and allowing collaborative editing via any of these.