• Virgin America Chrome App Helps You Choose Where To Go, What To Pack

    Alexia Tsotsis

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Friday, August 12th, 2011
    Screen Shot 2011-08-12 at 7.14.05 PM

    Developed alongside with the Google/Virgin America Chromebooks partnership, the “Virgin America Traveler” app is now available in the Chrome app store as promised back in June.

    While other airlines also have branded Chrome apps and extensions (like the American Airlines Cents-per-mile Extension HOT STUFF I KNOW), Virgin has at least tried to be interesting with Traveler. To provide content for the app it’s partnered up with UrbanDaddy, offering its curated granular travel recommendations for Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Chicago and well as packing tips for all destinations.

    To use the app users input can in their gender and the where, when and kind of trip in order to get suggestions for what to pack and where to go, presented in a visual list form.

    Users can also select their specific traveling preferences to build Trip Inspiration boards based on criteria like Trip Vibe and Must Do activities. Users can pick from a selection of images or add their own images from Picasa to their boards.

    The app then recommends destinations that correspond to the “mood” of your Inspiration Board (so far it’s only recommending New York, SFO and Los Angeles for me, maybe it’s broken or maybe I’m just hyper urban). And, because why waste a lead gen opportunity, it directs you towards buying Virgin tickets to these destinations. Of course.

    And if anything this is one slick piece of airline marketing. Which is what Virgin is all about I guess.

    You can download the app here.