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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

blog.garrytan.com

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Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

#3

Post by keeptrying »

Been there, done that unfortunately - long time ago. Pivoted to selling experiences Sold by adventure SME. Was impossible to scale as each needed support to get their adventure itineraries online.

Painful.

Travel planning seems to be common wrong idea and the other is dating websites.

Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

#9

Post by neither_color »

Which leads us back to trip planning. How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you're lucky. In fact, Americans are notorious for shirking vacation, clocking the lowest rates of vacation on the planet. Twice a year just doesn't cut it.

This is something I've thought about before. European friends I've met put a lot more thought into destination "discovery" than Americans do. From my own observation, Americans just want to go to places they've been to before(for example that yearly trip to Cancun or Miami) or to a place that theyve been invited to for a specific purpose ("my friend's wedding in Vegas"). In those cases most of the planning is already decided for you, and you only think of where you'll stay and what you'll do when you get there. Only a very small set of would-be nomads or people on backpacking trips seem to be interested in frequently planning new place discovery.

Before Covid though I did start to see more aspirational trip planning come up in casual conversations based on places they'd seen on social media. For example in the years before covid Bali was really well known among Europeans, but wasnt on many Americans' radar until they started seeing instagrammars photographing beautiful locations. Most talks were of the "would be nice" variety. These are my own anecdotes from talking to people of course, the only evidence I can think of is that there were no direct flights from mainland America to Indonesia like there were for Thailand, Australia, and Singapore. I wonder if there's a way for a social media savvy would-be trip planning startup to target people who follow and interact with travel "influencers" with messaging like "here's how you can make it to X, on $50/daily spend, within a time constraint of 2-3 weeks" I personally was inspired by a guest blog post on Tim Ferriss site many years ago.

https://tim.blog/2013/08/05/cheap-travel-in-paris-new-york-h...

Note: Im thinking in 2019 or 202X post-pandemic terms. Covid is a whole new level of trip planning complexity and ethics that merits its own discussion. You definitely cant go to Bali as a tourist at all right now.

Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

#10

Post by tomhoward »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #6

That's interesting! Google's is very good, myself and my friends use it. Perhaps solely due to its tight integration with your Gmail and search.

It works for Google as they make basically all the money in online travel. Like, really, Google makes so much money out of travel, it's worth it for them to invest huge amounts on getting people to plan/book travel on their platform, because it just means more money for them.

The biggest players in online travel, Booking Holdings (Fmr Priceline Group) and Expedia combined spent $11B on Google advertising in 2019, which was about half their reported revenues that year.

The point of the blog post – that travel planning apps can't get user retention – doesn't apply to Google, as most people use Google every day anyway, so they already have the retention, and it's easy for them to funnel people into their travel section when they see a user entering travel searches into the main search box.

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