Travel reservations

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A travel reservation portal could allow the traveller to spend a percentage of the commission in a goodgifts.org-like shop with the Special Laptop Program as one choice.^{[Semipostal stamp]} Another percentage could be allocated for programs determined by the site operator.

• TravelTainment can reserve flights, cars, hotels, holiday packages, vacation homes and last minute holidays.
• Pegasus is only for hotels.

Some ideas

Rationale: Sierra Leone is an extremely poor nation with tremendous inequality in income distribution. While it possesses substantial mineral, agricultural, and fishery resources, its economic and social infrastructure is not well developed, and serious social disorders continue to hamper economic development. Nearly half of the working-age population engages in subsistence agriculture. Manufacturing consists mainly of the processing of raw materials and of light manufacturing for the domestic market.[1]

A travel service could operate a call center in Freetown (Sierra Leone), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Bissau (Guinea-Bissau), Niamey (Niger) or Bamako (Mali) and use the call center to teach, among other things, the languages French and English. Lower cost of living would probably allow some additional luxuries (teachers, additional education), while allowing sufficient salaries. Low salaries could even be seen as a feature here, so as not to make such an employment attractive for sufficiently educated or wealthy people (Any office work may appear attractive for larger societal circles in a developing country). The call center PCs probably should run Sugar, which would also emphasize a school character of the facility. Services of the call center could be made available to all certified OLPC travel partners.

A call center could be situated near a university with a pedagogical department and allow students of the department to work as online tutors.^{[Promoting teacher education]} Students could be equipped with XO laptops after graduation to be able to continue working as online tutors or mentors.

One could try to outsource a call center to (e.g.) T-Mobile USA or another call center operator interested to help. One could also certify call centers with educational facilities in developing countries with a separate certification process.

See: List of countries by Human Development Index#Low

See also

• Computer reservations system (Wikipedia)
• OpenTravel Alliance (Wikipedia)