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

blog.garrytan.com

61–70 of 165 posts

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

#61

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"…

I don't think this is a US vs Europe thing. There are a LOT of Europeans who go to the same exact beach in southern Europe every single year. Take any RyanAir flight from the UK to Spain, and you will see that the average passenger is not exactly the educated elite who have put a lot of thought into their trip.

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

#63
post #4

I thought it was task tracking software.

I haven't heard of anyone building this, is this what enterprise types are doing? Like a Jira or Monday.com?

Todoist, asana, Evernote, trello, etc etc. For a certain segment of society, services like these are perennially in demand, and there's always a new one promising a new twist that will actually keep you using it and transform your life.

Part of the ubiquitous demand for these services is because they're very useful, and partially it's because of how many people are sold on "productivity porn" and the idea that you can organize yourself out of being overwhelmed and ridden with FOMO anxiety (not on my high horse here: I've definitely been there).

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

#64
post #60
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time we travel with my friends we use the best travel planning software ever: a spreadsheet. It's the only tool that can bring together all the features you need, while giving you the flexibility of having your own organization: - maybe you want to list everything in one sheet, maybe you want to split the "established" and the "ideas" in different sheets - thanks to the beauty that is the Web, if something look…

>you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. There's no way I'm turning kids loose on a spreadsheet to tally their votes for a Disney vacation.

I didn't include that kind of users, because I'm not travelling with them. Just like you I wouldn't trust them with the main spreadsheet, but surely you can give them their own spreadsheet: they won't be participating in most decisions anyway, so it's not like you'll need to copy paste most of it

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

#65
post #62

Tell that to Pieter Levels, who's made a fortune off travel planning software as a one-man shop.

> Tell that to Pieter Levels, who's made a fortune off travel planning software as a one-man shop.

A "fortune".

He has a lot of little projects, what % of his revenue is his travel site/app? And how much?

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

#66
The best travel planning app, by far, is Gmail.

I've worked in the travel industry and we'd work on tools for travel planning, and we'd get excited that you could put your itinerary together with just a few clicks. You know what's cooler than putting your itinerary in one place with a few clicks? Doing it with zero. Emails flow into Google, they get pushed to your calendar. Zero clicks and it's all in one place. Amazing stuff.

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

#67

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.

What's wrong with dating websites? The only thing I can think of is how saturated this space is

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

#68
post #4

I thought it was task tracking software.

10 years ago it was todo lists.

Still going strong, at least in my circles. Kind of depressing to see bright people inventing another app with a checkbox on its icon

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

#69
Maybe the simple answer here is that people don't want to use the same tools they use at work all year for planning what is supposed to be a escape from work?

Also...one of my favorite parts of travel is the spontaneity it affords me. I loath the idea of turning my free time into just another work day but with one-offs like "going to the museum" instead of "meeting with sales" embedded into some app....bleh!

Also...maybe no one has been creative enough to crack the problem yet, and someday someone will finally come up with a piece of software that is useful in this domain.

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

#70
Bad B2C idea because Most people travel occasionally and at that point they could just do it on email/whatsapp groups.

Fair enough.

But, then i also see how someone starting as B2C will easily be able to pivot towards B2B, and sell to thousands of travel agencies selling tours to people. These companies are planning travel (for customers) everyday, multiple times. A SW like this will really help them with with saving time, resources and communicate better with customers.

So not such a bad idea after all.

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