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

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

#91

Post by manacit »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #77

> How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you're lucky. One thing I think all founders/Product people should consider is that there are off label(so to speak) uses for everything. Many many people use travel planning software as escapism from drudgery. This is an opportunity not just to sell them travel, but also anything that immediately salves their bor…

I completely agree with this, and I think the frequency with which people use Zillow is proof that there's a whole lot of advertising to sell around products that are aspirational, detail-heavy and very common for people to think about (vacations, buying a house/car, etc).

"Zillow for Traveling" is much closer to something that makes sense, but probably has a very small overlap with the actual work required to make a tactical planning application, which is extremely boring and probably bad to start out building.

I'm not really sure where to go with this, other than I would really love something that would let me zoom in on individual destinations and see what's popular / what "trips people do" that's a bit more guided than TripAdvisor / Yelp / Foursquare and a bit more of a journey than looking at ratings for individual things.

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

#92

Post by sib »

thehappypm wrote: post #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. Amaz…

But that's not travel planning. That's just "creating a consolidated itinerary of the things you've used some other tool to do the travel planning in." (Which is sorta useful except that G Cal doesn't really create the events in the most useful format...)

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

#93

Post by toast0 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #7

It needs a 2012 tag. I was excited to see what Yahoo trip planner does, only to find out it was discontinued long ago.

I worked for Yahoo Travel from 2004-2011 including on Trip Planner for several years, AMA? If they were talking about the mobile app thing though, I don't really know about that, that was done by another group with our data and then AFAIK left to wither on the vine; Yahoo's mobile strategy wasn't ever clear and never worked out for the lower importance properties like Travel. Travel itself got turned into a 'magazine' property with just articles then fully killed after I left.

To add a little blurb about what Trip Planner was, you could make a Trip (yahoo login require), and you could share with your friends (I believe we had read-only or read/write permissions) and make it public or keep it private. A trip had two main parts: the plan and an (optional) journal.

The plan would let you add items such as a hotel or point of interest or restaurant from our catalog, your flight details perhaps, or just a city, and you could also add your own items if you wanted to stop somewhere not in our catalog. You could also add notes to the items, and schedule them. You could see them all on a map and do multipoint driving directions (which was cool when we did it!). You could add things from the trip plan page, or while browsing our site Y! Travel was like 1/3rd a booking frontend for Travelocity and later someone else, 1/3rd a travel guide like TripAdvisor, and 1/3rd other stuff like Trip Planner; the travel guide section add links to add stuff to your trip plan or view other people's trip plans that had that stuff in it.

The journal was more or less a blog thing; text and pictures etc. Some people would work on these while on their trip, but probably more would fill it out when they got home as a way to kind of remember and share their experience.

Public trips had a comments section (optionally) and there was a 'like' button, the owner could add tags, but others could also add tags. All the web 2.0 junk.

Courtesy of the Internet Archive, here's someone's trip that was highlighted at some point: their trip plan https://web.archive.org/web/20111027022849/http://travel.yah... and their trip journal https://web.archive.org/web/20111103064256/http://travel.yah...

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

#94

Post by wly_cdgr »

The good version of this wouldn't be about making it easier or faster, it would be about making a sandbox for semi-structured social fantasy trip planning. Let people plan trips they may or may not ever take, just for fun. Like people create and customize characters in RPGs and The Sims just for fun

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

#95

Post by nwienert »

manacit wrote: post #91
maerF0x0 wrote: post #77

> How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you're lucky. One thing I think all founders/Product people should consider is that there are off label(so to speak) uses for everything. Many many people use travel planning software as escapism from drudgery. This is an opportunity not just to sell them travel, but also anything that immediately salves their bor…

I completely agree with this, and I think the frequency with which people use Zillow is proof that there's a whole lot of advertising to sell around products that are aspirational, detail-heavy and very common for people to think about (vacations, buying a house/car, etc). "Zillow for Traveling" is much closer to something that makes sense, but probably has a very small overlap with the actual work required to make a…

Working on something like this actually, with a few differences of course but that’s the gist. Email me if interested in giving feedback.

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

#96

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

flyinglizard wrote: post #75
rnoorda wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use normal Tinder, and ask every match to a date playing basketball! The problem solves itself.

As wisely said, “the ‘Facebook for X’ is Facebook”.

True, except for LinkedIn because you can't post your drunken ragers and be professional all at once.

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

#97

Post by kipchak »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #76
munificent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said more succinctly: It's hard to make a successful product that reduces the time people spend doing something they love to do. Some ways I could imagine addressing this and the problem the article talks about: * Aim to make travel planning not easier (i.e. less time-consuming) but more fun. Treat the app more like a game or media app where users spend more time planning their trip by using the app in enjoyable ways…

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…

It didn't do much in terms of ranking or customizing things based on your interest but Niantic's Field Trip app was somewhat like that. I think if it hadn't been killed off it might have evolved into something like that.

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

#98

Post by Existenceblinks »

Planing trip is soul-crushing for me. All my friends said they super excited when planing, i got completely the opposite impression. All these schedule disaster starting from flight departure and landing time, bad timing produce lots of wasted time, landing to a city at wrong time adds an extra night (lost unnecessary money). Bus schedule is also disaster, "is there any bus" anxiety. Unexpected events suppose to happen and lost more money. Yep, the "supposed to be the fun most part" so called "get lost" is not fun at all. Fun parts are only like 40-60%.

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

#99

Post by temporalparts »

This might get buried, but I'll put this idea out there.

Background:

I'm someone who has traveled fairly regularly (> 30 countries), with some trips comprised of solo backpacking across Europe or South-East Asia. I also think I'm really good at planning, which is largely about constraint optimizing and solving some version of TSP (traveling salesman).

The idea:

You're in a city. You tell the app all the places you want to check out. The app returns an itinerary, calculating TSP starting from your lodging, taking into account expected travel time, the times the places are open, lunch / dinner, etc.

I would personally find this really useful because it would replace hours that I spend optimizing my travels.

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

#100

Post by jimbokun »

munificent wrote: post #48
killion wrote: post #27

I had founded Flights With Friends for group travel planning shortly before this post. I read it when it came out but knew the point about travel being rare wasn't the cause of these product failures. The trouble with trip planning software is that making one that is 10X better than just planning it manually is very, very difficult. People love thinking about their trip and online tools don't make that more fun for t…

Said more succinctly: It's hard to make a successful product that reduces the time people spend doing something they love to do. Some ways I could imagine addressing this and the problem the article talks about: * Aim to make travel planning not easier (i.e. less time-consuming) but more fun. Treat the app more like a game or media app where users spend more time planning their trip by using the app in enjoyable ways…

Then you would probably want to fold it into something like Lonely Planet or a Rick Steves property.

Or of course a feature in AirBnB.

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