Free trip planner lets customers create their own tours

Back in 2006 we wrote about Belgian tour operator Wasteels’ Club Tour program enabling amateurs to plan trips for customers and then earn a commission. Now taking the customer-made theme a step further comes YourTour—which also happens to be Belgian—which lets consumers do it all themselves. YourTour is a free, personal tour planner that uses a mathematical algorithm to automatically generate fully customized trip plans. Currently focusing on self-drive tours of France, the technology was originally developed for tourism professionals by deciZium, a spinoff company from the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons. Users begin by entering their initial criteria, including the region they’d like to visit, the dates, the type of tour, and the starting and ending points. YourTour then generates a proposed tour including hotels, activities and budget, allowing the user to choose at each step along the way whether to keep or delete any suggestion. deciZium has partnered with Lonely Planet for the suggested activities while Booking.com handles the online hotel reservations once the user is satisfied with their plan. For professional use, YourTour is accessible as a web service in ASP or in XML. More countries will soon be added to its trip-planning capabilities, the company says. While YourTour undoubtedly offers myriad benefits for DIY consumers, there are clearly also intriguing opportunities for related businesses. A hotel chain, for example, could use the technology to suggest tours built around its own hotels, as the site suggests itself; similarly, a tour operator could let clients create customized tours around its own offerings. Hospitality professionals: time to do some brainstorming! (Related: Trip planner suggests travelling music — Route planner with a wiki twist.)