about TripThink
at passports.com
A custom travel trip planner. European destinations and points beyond.
TripThink is an element of the larger company web site
passports.com designed (a) to
facilitate the enrollment, mid-term and final stage planning of groups planning
overseas travel trips under the auspices of the company, and (b) to
provide electronic marketing outreach to prospective group organizers,
particularly to those experienced travelers who are able and eager to
participate in the actual design of their overseas travel itineraries.
Principal among those responsible for the creation of TripThink is David G. Markle, who has had to sift through the
thousands of computer files given over to him, some of them dating back to the
mid-nineteen-eighties, and to craft out of them the notion of a text-on-demand
custom trip planner nested within a help-mate application at the service of
current and prospective travel group organizers. With the introduction of
TripThink in early 2005, David has spent
nearly three years at this task.
Not alone, of course. Chris Breault is a talented computer
programmer who, in his chosen medium of Cold Fusion (tm),
a computer application programming language, has rendered even the
sometimes unreasonable challenges presented to him by this project into
functioning, anticipatory and self-referential computer code. If the thing
works under your mouse, thank Chris.
Nor does it stop here, by any means. Kathi O'Neil is a long-time company
employee who knows its mainstay and repeating teacher clients by first name, and
who has been responsible for the rendition of their past and possibly future
travel programs into the language that TripThink understands. When things don't seem to be working as well as
they should "on the electronic ground," it is from Kathi O'Neil that
David Markle and Chris Breault hear about it.
The whole thing rests on travel text, of course, and emphatic credit for this
text is due to Martine Prouty, who over the last ten years has written the
thousands of well-informed and poetically-expressed travel itineraries which,
modularized, form the basis for the TripThink custom trip planner.
Martine would insist, and rightly so, that this credit be shared with her
assistants, including at this writing Kelly Eggleston, Janet Kelley, and
Jennifer Suprenant. Martine Prouty is the world-class travel writer,
par excellence.
The TripThink video tutorial was created by the company's videographer,
Giuseppe "Lupo" Lupoi.
Finally, credit is due to the company's graphic arts designer, Liz Ichton,
who created the colorful clickable icons and page designs which give TripThink
its screen environment and "feel," and to the many company employees,
and teachers in the field, who have so
enthusiastically participated in the long "beta testing" of this company
project.
This has been about TripThink at
passports.com.
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