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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)

#151

Post by Misdicorl »

yosito wrote: post #138
Misdicorl wrote: post #124

The travel app I want is "on the way". It shows you cool things to do when in transit from point a to point b that's only an X minute detour. Or decent food/coffee. Or... It's frustratingly hard to search google maps/etc with a query like this.

Hmm, I think this is easy to do on Google maps. Put in your origin and destination, then add a destination, and search for what you want, the map will show you results along your route with the number of minutes detour.

This requires me to know where along the path to search. But that's specifically what I don't know

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

#152

Post by onwardly »

soniman wrote: post #107

"Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana. 1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books 2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates 3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting 4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a…

Ouch. I literally did this. Built a site to buy/sell textbooks. Moved abroad, learned the language. Built a business to teach travelers the local lingo. 10 years later, it was acquired (at a loss). Currently on (9).

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

#153

Post by BeFlatXIII »

rnoorda wrote: post #36
jrm4 wrote: post #31

Again, I gotta nominate "Tinder, but for pickup basketball" as the most common bad startup (or at least app) idea. I get excited college students hitting me up with this nearly every semester, like clockwork.

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

The contrapositive of "every website is a dating website if you try hard enough"

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

#154

Post by aabbcc1241 »

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…

Maybe a hotel "ig shop" would be a more popular choice.

In my region people abuse ig for all kind of use cases.

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

#155

Post by silverpepsi »

mikevm wrote: post #148
silverpepsi wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who travels full time, Google's introduction of yellow blobs on the maps in the past year or two has been an absolute game changer for me. I used to look up the name of a known walking street and then try to make sure I'd mastered all that was worth seeing by doing the perimeter including ended up spending hours on alleys that lead to nothingness (car coridors or residential areas of 0 interest at the edge…

what are these yellow blobs?

Does Google track everyone's phone location with Android to be able to give traffic info? Well I guess similarly they track the foot traffic and can indicate where in cities there is extremely concentrated foot traffic ... I.e. perfect areas to walk and explore.

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

#156

Post by thehappypm »

sib wrote: post #92
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...)

It creates a central plan based on what I’ve booked.

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

#157

Post by phsource »

d--b wrote: post #118
phsource wrote: post #80

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-…

Neato, this looks great. Small(ish) request, can you add weather info in there? Always super important to know to reshuffle activities properly.

This is on our roadmap! A bunch of folks have asked for it, and there are good APIs

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

#158

Post by Graffur »

lostinquebec wrote: post #104
Graffur wrote: post #102

No stats on Yahoo travel usage, no stats on how many people love to work on the travel product idea, no stats on how common the travel product idea is, no data on the problem of 'spending enough quality time with friends and family' or how that relates to travel. Also, some things I do less than travel: * Amazon prime day sales (once a year) * Christmas (once a year) * Dentist (2/3 times a year) * Get my car serviced…

> Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) 2012. Can you name a travel planning startup in the last 9 years?

2012. Can I name a startup in the last 9 years? Probably not.

Hipmunk is the only one to come to mind but it's from pre 2012

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

#159

Post by timwis »

I was thinking the same thing recently for looking for a flat with a partner/roommate. A collaborative triage/kanban style system for reviewing/contacting/setting up a viewing would be great, but a typical user would only use it once every 1-3 years, and by the next time they need it, they may have forgotten about it, or it may be old and outdated by then.

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

#160

Post by maerF0x0 »

neutronicus wrote: post #146
manacit wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The more you lean into the "facilitate daydreaming" angle, the more you're just Instagram, though, right?

Maybe it's me failing to train the algorithm well, but my IG explore feed is pure trash. It's all kinds of junk fitness stuff that is just recycled content (accounts that steal and post from other accounts) .

Not sure how to un train it to find actually valuable content now

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