Today a new site appeared from Expedia, Inc.,’s engineering team: Expedia Labs, which shows off the company’s experimental travel tech projects, such as its Facebook bot and its prototype cruise-comparison tool.

Expedia Labs highlights concepts that the company or its partners have been testing and that usually have come out of its hackathons. One of the projects is a group-travel planning tool that enables multiple travelers to build a shared itinerary.

The company says its goal is to expose these projects to outside developers and use the feedback to choose which ideas to implement.

The Expedia Labs site also provides the industry and consumers with a peek at how the online travel giant is experimenting with user design and services.

A case in point: The ExpediaThis project. If a user comes across an inspiring travel image, he or she can tweet or tag it to the @ExpediaThis Twitter handle and the software will analyze the image metadata to pinpoint telltale landmark, geolocation, and related information and then prompt @ExpediaThis to tweet back a link to the most relevant page on the Expedia site for booking a trip that’s related to the image. Here’s a video that explains it:

In a related move, the company said it will host its first Travel Think Tank to showcase mobile travel concepts in San Francisco today.
Developer teams have been invited to share their prototypes to experts made up of executives within and external to Expedia. The experts will judge the ideas by criteria like business merit and inventiveness. Company chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi will attend.

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