You may have noticed that you can not currently search for or book flights.

We are currently changing to a new and more flexible flight booking system in order to include flights in our competition, giving customers the chance to win their flights for free along with their accommodation, vehicle hire and activities.

This means that customers will have a fixed chance to win their flights (yes, including international flights) for free once the new system is live. Refer to the competition terms and conditions for more details once the system is live.

The new system will behave in the same way as our old one on the front end, but with a number of improvements such as faster search times and more flight options.

It will also allow for a deeper integration with your travel itinerary (ePlan) over time.

With the global financial crisis having hit a number of people hard, we at ePlanner wanted to do something above and beyond in order to give back to our customers.

We thought about providing loyalty points which could be used towards future bookings, but decided against this for the following reasons:

• Even if we were able to provide 3% ($3 for every $100) of the booking price, it would have a minimal impact upon most customers and require them to spend a lot before they could see any significant benefits.
• Customers would not be given the chance of getting any benefits the first time they book.
• Its been done!

After much thought, we came up with an idea which we think is awesome and we hope you do too. What we decided to do is provide our customers with a fixed chance to win their holiday (products booked through ePlanner only) for FREE!

This means that unlike most competitions where there is a limited prize pool and everyone’s chance of winning is decreased as more people enter, we have an unlimited prize pool which grows with each booking made through us. As such, your chance of winning remains the same whether 100 or 1 million people enter the competition. How awesome is that!

Due to this type of competition not having been provided before, there were a number of challenges we had to identify and overcome to eliminate any risk of it being gamed and to ensure that all entrants are treated fairly and provided with the appropriate chance of winning.

After much R&D and an amazing effort by the ePlanner development team, we are finally ready to launch the competition!

At the moment, residents of some states are excluded from the competition due to licensing (refer to the terms and conditions), based upon the supplied address. These states will be included soon. Flights are also temporarily excluded, but will be included soon.

GOOD LUCK!

As promised, we have just rolled out a number of improvements and additions to ePlanner.

Improvements:

There have been a number of minor improvements to make your experience more enjoyable, but the major improvement has been to the activity, accommodation and search process. This will make searches faster, allow you to open multiple description pages at once and will provide you with a permanent url which you can bookmark and/or share for each of these categories’ search result and description pages.

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Additions:

Leaving the best for last, we have made a number of additions to the latest version of the website. The major additions include:

• The ability to search for and book campervan hire.
• A conflict checking feature for the itinerary, allowing you to easily see if any entries in your ePlan have time conflicts or have become unavailable.
• The area info section, complete with descriptions of each region, amazing photos and stunning videos.
• The ability to preview and print multiple days of your itinerary at once, with the option to include maps and directions between each of the locations that you plan to visit.

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We hope that everyone loves the improvements as much as we do.

Thank you to everyone for the great feedback (please keep it coming). With this release, planning a holiday to Australia or within Australia is about to become even easier!

Have you ever tried to plan and book an entire holiday online?

If so, then you will know that bringing multiple travel components together to create a detailed and customised travel itinerary has always been an extremely frustrating exercise due to all the variables involved (price, ever changing availability, operating hours, distance, travel time, weather etc).

Well you can now leave those bad travel planning memories in the past and never look back. ePlanner makes it easier and more rewarding than ever before to plan a customised travel itinerary to or within Australia.

ePlanner’s search and planning functionality is free to use and will enable you to plan your entire holiday using live availability and pricing data. You can then book what you have planned, with clarity and confidence that everything fits together well, fits within your budget, meets your requirements and that you are getting the absolute maximum value out of your travel time and money!

The website has been live for a while now and users have already made use of our search and booking functionality to find and book their flights, vehicle hire, accommodation and activities from a huge range of options and at fantastic prices.

We have received some wonderful feedback and will be rolling out a new and improved version of the website shortly. We will post about the changes closer to rolling them out.

Here are some of the ways in which ePlanner makes travel planning easy right now:

Firstly ePlanner consolidates a travel options from all over the internet to provide you with a huge range of options to choose from and great rates.

ePlanner then allows you to save any items you find on ePlanner to your travel itinerary (your “ePlan”), using live availability, pricing, times, contact details and much more.

Once items have been saved/entered into your ePlan, you are also able to:

• View maps and get directions between each of these items
• Search for travel options within a set distance of any of these items
• Edit the selected options for any of these items (e.g. session, number of tickets, number of guests)
• Move these items around in your ePlan using live availability and pricing info
• View info on each item, including contact details and booking references if they have been booked.
• Make sure that everything fits to your budget for that day or a specified period
• Add your own notes to each item
• Follow through and book any of these items with ease

You can also add items to your ePlan manually if you wish to add something not available on ePlanner.

Thank you for considering ePlanner as your travel planning and booking partner! Thank you for all the great feedback; please keep it coming. Also, don’t forget to let your family and friends know about us if they are looking for a way to plan their holiday with ease.

(Thanks to  linkbunnies.org on Flickr for the image)