Winner: Adioso
Judged by: Mark Grey, ChannelAdvisor
Adioso sets out to help discretionary leisure travellers find affordable flight deals to interesting destinations with ease. The company reported its users “may be ready to transact, or they may just want to fantasise”.
“The site has to work as well for people who want to buy a flight as it does for people who will visit weekly or daily to browse and dream about possibilities,” the founders said.
Adioso is a custom-built site, using a mix of open source platforms and proprietary technology. Its flexible search terms approach is unique. It allows consumers to type in sentences to a single search box such as: ‘Melbourne to overseas anytime’, ‘Sydney to Southeast Asia next month for 10 to 15 days’, or ‘Canberra to somewhere warm tomorrow’ and serves up the best results.
Another element is a “conversational approach” to filtering and narrowing search results. It emulates a conversation a consumer would have with a travel agent, such as ‘I’d like to go somewhere tropical and warm in June or July’.
“The secret sauce resides in flight routing and search engine called Wingtip, which enables flights to be searched with complete flexibility across dates and destinations, which has never been possible before in the history of the travel industry,” the founders said.
Adioso’s key tip to other businesses is to think about how people do things in the offline world.
“Understand the thought processes that underpin those things, and try to build interactions that mirror those thought processes. Spend a lot of time looking over people’s shoulder as they use your product.”
Runner-up: Urban Planters
Sustainable food is at the core of Urban Planters, a company which sells planter kits filled with different varieties of seeds to enable people to create their own vegetable patches at home.
Based in Geelong, Victoria, founder Coralie Schaff launched it to foster sustainability, environmental awareness and health consciousness. Its target audience is male and females aged from their mid-20s to mid-40s.
The site is built on an open source platform, and the design captures a sense of earthiness, and has personality thanks to a distinctive logo, the founder’s background story and images of the products for sale.
Category judge Mark Gray said: “I think it is highly engaging in a number of ways in terms of customer touch points in relation to Twitter and Facebook and Google+.
“The website is easy to navigate and the checkout experience is very straightforward and quite quick to purchase.”
