Can the ideal holiday be created by a database? Every time you book a flight online, review a hotel, or use an ATM, you're leaving a digital footprint. That's potential gold dust to a travel industry on the cusp of using big data to create personalised and intuitive itineraries that react to live events.
"Imagine being able to plan and search for travel door to door, with data such as how busy the airport is and the weather factored into that planning process," says Thomas Davenport, professor in analytics at Harvard Business School and author of a new report called "Big Data in the Travel Industry".
That scenario could be five years away, but such ideas are already taking flight. British Airways has a Know Me programme that gives flight attendants access to Google Images of passengers, plus their flying history and preferences.
Travel search site Kayak offers a predictive view of the change in the price of a flight over a seven-day window, while Hipmunk ranks flight search results in an "agony index", and hotels in an "ecstasy index".
"For flights, the system is able to look at new criteria such as stopovers needed, how frequently the flight is late, and so on, to predict how much agony you might need to endure," Davenport says.
Travel technology group Amadeus - which processes about a third of all global travel transactions and commissioned the report - now offers "extreme search", which replaces the traditional reliance on origin and destination, adding factors such as average temperature at the time of the planned trip.
Tell the website that you'd like to go somewhere in August where the temperature is over 30 degrees Celsius, that has golf courses, and it can find you options and remember your preferences for next time.