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

There are plenty of software companies in this space - much of the time the software company also owns the agencies... eg. TravelEdge. It's obviously an industry, meaning one could disrupt it etc, but it's not some untapped market.

I would have thought it's to-do/kanban or note-taking apps (but with some One Weird Reason they're different and about to take the world by storm). Which interestingly enough is not at all like the reasoning here - they're pretty sticky, or at least until you move on to try the next one - there's just so many of them you're going to need much bigger scope to even start to think about making any money at it. (e.g. Notion has legs, but it's both to-do/kanban and note-taking, and also database/CRM sort of thing. All the others I can think of are minor pieces of a much bigger pie - Atlassian, Microsoft Office or whatever Wunderlist fell into, Github, Gitlab, ...)

I dunno. I am surprised that there isn't something like "walk score" for a "visit score" - especially one where the score is based on what you want to do on your visit.

I get that when you're traveling to a new city, you usually have an idea for what neighborhood you want to stay in. A lot of cities - there's only 1-3 neighborhoods that are walkable and good for tourists.

Still, I'm surprised there's not an easy way to see what things there are nearby with some sort of ranking order based on what things you want to do.

That's not a bad idea, it's a good idea.

Maybe a bad 'business idea', in that it probably won't make a ton of money, but as a solution, expanded into other casual sports, it might make sense.

Pick Up BB has a lot of participants, who are not at the court at the same time.

An app where you tap a button and say 'Who's Up For Hoops' and it connects you with others, is a great idea.

You could work with cities to schedule the courts.

If there is a legit need, there's opportunity.

The challenge with such things is generating enough penetration that it becomes 'a thing' - so many great ideas I see would work really well if they did create a critical mass, and, of course, it'd be hard to make money.

I can see, in the future, these things working out.

A partnership with a famous baller, and perhaps with a sports drink or Nike or something, where they integrate it with Nike's 3 on 3 competition, you register for points, show your best moves etc.. It could theoretically work.

I wish we had better mechanisms for escalating these more niche apps into common public consciousness.

Oh boy -- I'm the cofounder of Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), a YC W19 startup exactly focused on planning travel. And I've really read all these articles

This originally was big on Hacker News in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658

This is really just the latest in a long list of articles about why travel planning startups aren't worth pursuing:

- https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never-consider-a-t...

- https://paansm.medium.com/the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-star...

But we're still at it and have grown a ton over the past year!

- On frequency: I think we're underestimating folks' ability to remember here! If the product actually is good, people will remember it.

- On being a real pain point: It's true that people have many "good enough" solutions to travel planning, but travel planning tools have failed because the past products really just haven’t been better by enough than using Google Sheets -- they assume that people don't like planning, or that they plan a certain way, and try to save time and automate it. In fact, people _love_ planning and sharing their trips! The tool just needs to work around the traveler, rather than dictate

Still, it's instructive that none of the links in the 2014 post's comments work. Will we prove them wrong? We can check back in 3 years when this article comes back to the front page again xD