Creating a self updating database for Cruises

Hi!

I have ran a few not so successful websites in my day, but I recently acquired a new domain that I hope will change my fortunes.

I got a great cruise domain and I am looking to be able to have a setup where people can choose their destinations and it will slowly eliminate any cruises that don't match.

So let's say someone wants to go to jamaica, mexico, and florida. I am envisioning a search area that let's you click or tick a box next to a destination while automatically eliminating cruises. That way if they tick too many boxes and no cruises match, they can untick a box before searching.

What would be the best way to implement this? Thanks for any help.

 

Well, depending on how many choices of destinations they have, it might be wise to have different types of selections - countries first, maybe, then wittle it down from there. A departure point might also be prudent, since many people will prefer to leave from close to home. You could have a listing of all the cruises available on the page (I'm thinking large thumbnails with a bit of info in them, say 3 or 4 pr line, and then just continuing down the page), and remove those that doesn't match all criteria. You might also want to offer the ability to chose both AND and OR for choices (ie, they want to go to mexico, jamaica and florida, but are willing to exchange jamaica with something else, for instance)

 

Thank you for the other suggestions. That would be really nice but I'll have to figure out a way to keep everything in a database to do that. Not sure how to start.

 

Well, you'll have to have the information available anyway, don't you? The cruises, I mean? How you get those cruises to your webpage is not really relevant to how you represent the selecting process for the user - you could check to see if it's possible to get a hold of the large cruise-lines' API (if they have one), for incorporating their schedules on your page, etc. Scraping their websites might work as well, depending on what info you need. All of this can be stored in a database, if you want, but you can do the filtering on raw data directly on the webpage as well, if need be. No need for DB-calls for that (not necessarily).

 

None of the cruise lines seem to have an API so it will need to be updated by hand or scraped from their site. It is still in the very infant stages, so I thank you for your help!

 

The cruise lines themselves may not have an API, but you should hook into a travel booking engine like travelocity or priceline (something with an affiliate program of course). They'll provide an API for you to get data from--or better yet, you can just use one of their pre-existing widgets to hold all the data. I know priceline has this, and pretty good widgets too. But I believe you need to be an established business or site to get registered. They MAY be in Commission Junction.

 

You sound absolutely lost. You bought a nice sounding domain name and figured it would be awesome to make a cruise web site..... yet you have no idea how to implement or plan it? Sounds like a poor strategy.