Associated New Media (ANM) has selected the Site Search and Sentiment Analysis capabilities of FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP) for its online travel site, ThisisTravel.co.uk.
FAST provided ANM with a single enterprise search solution, as well as replacing manual hotel reviews with automatic sentiment analysis.

“FAST is enabling ANM to offer its ThisisTravel site users new search functionality that offers a cleaner, faster and more relevant search experience,” said John M. Lervik, FAST’s chief executive officer. “This provides ANM with a higher level of customer satisfaction as it helps the customers to effectively find their travel destination of choice, and consequently also increases ANM’s revenues in the highly competitive travel industry. FAST is the only enterprise search vendor that has the flexibility and scalability to grow with them as they continue to be a leader in online travel planning.”

Based on FAST ESP, FAST’s Site Search solutions deliver enterprise-wide capabilities for organisations that want to simultaneously support general search and/or multiple specialised search functions. The solutions can be rapidly implemented with little or no impact on the enterprise’s current systems. They are meticulously designed for highly efficient operation on low-cost, high-performance commodity servers, work cooperatively with existing infrastructures, and are built to accommodate three-dimensional growth. This ensures that organisations experience the same high level of performance out of every server that gets added to the platform, with no fade-off as numbers grow.

With FAST’s automatic sentiment analysis capabilities, ThisisTravel users have the ability to view a numeric sentiment analysis of hotels based on the large number of reviews written by travellers who have visited those properties. By viewing sentiment of the information in past reviews based on a scale of 1-10, users are now able to make faster and more efficient travel decisions that meet their specific needs.

“The guided navigation and sentiment analysis capabilities found in FAST ESP are enabling ThisisTravel to reach a new level of customer satisfaction,” said Alex Saint, publisher, ThisisTravel. “Our customers now have instant access to thousands of hotel reviews from fellow travellers, aggregated from many different sources, providing them with the insight they need to make well-informed travel decisions. FAST has strengthened ThisisTravel’s position as the UK’s one-stop destination for travel planning worldwide.”
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