If you’re always drooling over Insta-worthy vacation spots, easyJet just made it a lot, well, easier to book your travel plans. The new feature, Look&Book, relies on a screenshot of the destination to book the flight based on easyJet’s schedule.
Head of Digital Experience at easyJet, Daniel Young, said, “Look&Book will help people to further explore Europe with ease and open up new destinations and previously hidden holiday locations for a range of customers.” That means, however, that the feature is currently only limited to easyJet's European destinations.
I was skeptical, so I tried it on an Instagram post where I could verify the location. I found an Instagram post featuring a vacation destination in Europe to screenshot and downloaded the easyJet app.
I cropped out the location information and caption to really test Look&Book’s ability to recognize the image.
It took a minute for the easyJet app to review the photo, but it determined that to reach this destination, I’d have to fly into Genoa GOA. After some quick research on how to get to Portofino, the city set as the location in the post, I found that Look&Book was correct!
From there, it set me up to find a flight depending on my travel plans. Look&Book could not, however, help me find where exactly in Portofino I need to be to recreate this photo.
If I'm going to plan a vacation around an image, I want to at least be able to visit the exact location that I swooned over in the first place. This feature is solely limited to finding the airport and flight you want to take.
I didn’t actually book anything, considering it’s the middle of the semester, but even if I was realistically planning a vacation, Look&Book probably wouldn’t be my go-to option. It’s a great way to identify where a picture actually came from, but you’re limited to easyJet flights. With so many airlines to chose from, I’d rather take my time deciding. Plus, it all felt a little too Twilight Zone-esque for me.
The use of image recognition in this way seemed out of our current realm of capabilities, and if we can book our vacation plans from just a picture, I’m both scared and excited to see what technology comes next. For now, I plan to leave the vacation photos on Instagram, but if you're having trouble deducing where your acquaintance's stunning vacation actually took place, Look&Book may be able to help.
