[HN Gopher] Travel planning software: The most common bad startu...
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
Author : domrdy
Score : 149 points
Date : 2021-09-10 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.garrytan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.garrytan.com)
| firemelt wrote:
| damn I also have this bad idea before lol
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| 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%.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I've done the planning for our last few vacations (2x Scotland,
| Iceland, Maine, and Charleston SC) and quite enjoyed the
| research. The key for me is to NOT plan too much. Flights and
| accommodation, of course, but once in a location, I just list
| 5-6 things to do in a day and only expected to do 2-3.
|
| A trip that needs highly coordinated planning (tour of Peru
| including the Inca Trail) got outsourced to a specialist.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 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 boredom. Maybe a
| weekend getaway, a movie night tonight, or a hot date with a hot
| <gender> this week?
|
| In this case the off label usage likely is much more frequent
| than the real thing because as Garry says people do not take much
| vacation; but how often do they dream of vacations?-- all the
| time.
|
| Similar could be said about realtor.com People arent there just
| to buy houses, but to dream of what their current house could be
| (that they cannot afford). So maybe they're viewing lots of
| houses with pools? Sell them an above ground pool and a luxurious
| lounge chair...
| manacit wrote:
| 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.
| nwienert wrote:
| Working on something like this actually, with a few
| differences of course but that's the gist. Email me if
| interested in giving feedback.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > > How often do people really plan trips? ... probably once or
| twice a year if you're lucky.
|
| > Many many people use travel planning software as escapism
|
| Heh yeah I caught that too. My wife plans many, _many_ trips
| per year - but we certainly don 't go on all of them, hah. The
| planning is a hobby in itself.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| sib wrote:
| 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...)
| temporalparts wrote:
| 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.
| ebiester wrote:
| This was my first startup idea. I started digging into it in 2010
| with the idea of making it more sticky by "step 1: plan your
| travel around the attractions you want to see. Step 2: We'll show
| you the best hotels close to where you really want to stay. Step
| 3. Book! Step 4. Take your pictures and upload to our app, and
| we'll make a website for you that your friends will want to
| track, and you'll come back to with warm memories." Basically,
| social network cross blog cross build a community. The idea was
| to tie into local experiences. (Back then, the travel affiliate
| programs were a bit better.) Unfortunately, it was bigger than
| what I could do as a solo developer back then, and I wasn't in a
| place to court investment, and realistically speaking, it wasn't
| worth investing in once I started doing the cost / revenue
| business model.
|
| I think in the next few years, this might get toward what a solo
| developer could reasonably support for a dedicated community,
| moving into the lifestyle business arena. I think the real value
| is getting the community of frequent travelers and optimizing for
| their experiences. There's a giant travel influencer segment now
| and cross-promotion is where it would be.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| It needs a 2012 tag. I was excited to see what Yahoo trip planner
| does, only to find out it was discontinued long ago.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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...
| domrdy wrote:
| Apologies. I will add the correct tag next time.
| killion wrote:
| 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 them.
|
| If someone made a tool that was better than planning your trip in
| your head it doesn't matter that you aren't taking a trip all the
| time. Because most people are always planning their next trip in
| their mind.
|
| I thought I had something that made it better, but I was wrong. A
| couple of years later I pivoted to Suiteness to focus on just the
| part that worked best - selling suites and connecting rooms that
| hotels don't make available online.
| munificent wrote:
| 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. Put a ton of discovery and
| browsing ideas for things to do in it. Pinterest for vacations
| and activities. Basically Instagram, but with a "book this"
| button next to that pretty sunset photo.
|
| * Focus only on the parts of travel that aren't fun. Haggling
| over fares, logistics, reaching consensus with travel partners,
| etc.
|
| * Support use cases beyond just travel planning. If it's also a
| commute planner, or "what do this weekend in town" planner, it
| may get used frequently enough to stay in a user's mind.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| basch wrote:
| Even more succinctly: establishing consensus should be fun in
| and of itself. People dont know what they dont know. They
| dont want to plan. They do want to daydream.
|
| Make voting addictive and make the tally results easy to
| interpret, and aggregated. Not only what restaurants got
| picked, but a sum of them by type. Popeyes may have gotten 3
| votes, but "Mexican Cantinas" may have gotten 4, albeit 4
| different restaurants.
|
| Things like "what cities I want to visit with my friends" may
| or may not change between years.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| kipchak wrote:
| 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.
| ezfe wrote:
| The other thing is that travel planning is flexible and
| uncertain. Computers are inherently specific.
|
| Creating a program that doesn't interfere with this "maybe
| we'll do this, and if we do this then the trip will be X days,
| but if we do that then it will be Y days" isn't easy.
| gverrilla wrote:
| I disagree. Most people love to imagine vacations, but then
| they realize they have to pay for it. It's only a minority that
| is "always planning their next trip in their mind", at least
| where I live. We all have a vague idea of where we wanna go
| next, but going from vague idea to realization is not very fun
| for most people. Realization is fun, or at least should be.
| Tourism is actually dead, and most people feel that deep in.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > most people are always planning their next trip in their
| mind.
|
| You may not be thinking of a representative sample of people.
| clairity wrote:
| i once produced the annual catalog for a traditional travel
| package company, filled with pictures and enticingly-crafted
| copy (at merely-high to outrageous prices). the whole thing was
| designed to move potential customers from rational to emotional
| decision-making and apply simple price discrimination mechanics
| to maximize revenue. low tech but effective.
|
| it seems like most travel planning software fails due to the
| too-common misapplication of technology to solve marketing
| problems.
| cubano wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| A relative is a librarian. She was recently asked for help
| using a dating site to find the patron a date to bowling league
| night. Some team of founders might be up for it...
| jollybean wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yeah, I suppose I mean "bad" in terms of "getting the thing
| off the ground."
| dsr_ wrote:
| Add a self-rating system:
|
| - Actually, I'm here for the beer
|
| - Sometimes when I shoot, I score
|
| - I have some moves
|
| - I used to be good
|
| - I am good
|
| - Serious
|
| and offer to either match people by level or build two teams
| that are evenly matched. After the game, ask people if they
| thought it was fun and if they thought the self-ratings were
| fair.
|
| Later you get to add teams, quasi-teams, and leagues, if
| there's enough interest. But always start by asking if they
| want to do a pick-up game.
| sokoloff wrote:
| One made it to Shark Tank (no deal):
| https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/
| foobiekr wrote:
| I thought the inundation of "Tinder, but for X" was just
| something I was experiencing. Thank you for mentioning it.
| akor wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd say it's most common but I'd nominate event
| ticketing as a common bad startup idea.
| rnoorda wrote:
| Just use normal Tinder, and ask every match to a date playing
| basketball! The problem solves itself.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| As wisely said, "the 'Facebook for X' is Facebook".
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| True, except for LinkedIn because you can't post your
| drunken ragers and be professional all at once.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I often wish there was better trip/adventure planning software
| for the things I want to do for the next three years. Many things
| are cyclical (annual), or seasonal, or when I'm in certain places
| (I have lists for when I'm in LA, or Berlin). Keeping track of
| all the opportunities I care about along those 3 criteria is a
| lot of manual work right now.
|
| I do miss old school Foursquare, only somewhat apropos.
| weedpeg wrote:
| 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.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| 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.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| I always thought it was grocery delivery or mail-order pet
| supplies.
|
| There are honest-to-charlie geniuses out there. I think that the
| founder of Pixelon needs a giant trophy.
| jmartens wrote:
| I love that this was first posted in 2012 and it is still true
| today! The other common bad startup idea: parking apps! When I
| organized and facilitated Startup Weekends, we had one in just
| about every batch.
| pilingual wrote:
| Several years ago a prominent SV individual (now investor) wrote
| why investors do not fund dating apps. Since then, several apps
| like Bumble and Hinge have had very successful M&A. So I don't
| think these blog posts are particularly valuable except to stop
| someone who isn't creative enough to break away from the typical
| path successfully.
|
| I created a failed travel app which was pitched as "Tinder for
| Travel" (also an unsuccessful pitch as some people thought it was
| Tinder while you are traveling, but wouldn't that just be
| Tinder?).
|
| The idea was not a travel app, per se. It was for weekend
| staycations, since I had the problem of coming up with an
| itinerary for the day if I wanted to go out and about. Where to
| go in the morning? Where to have lunch? What afternoon activity
| could I do? Dinner? These were typical annoyances I had every
| weekend so I figured an app would help.
|
| The app was too broad, imo. If it were to be successful, it
| probably needed to start as a feature. One idea the app's co-
| creator Zach came up with was spots for the perfect instagram
| post. Personally I was thinking to narrow the scope entirely to,
| say, a weekend in Healdsburg (this would suffer from the problem
| Garry discusses, though!).
|
| I believe there is something to the staycation idea, as it is
| exactly what you'd want on a vacation as well. It's too nebulous
| even after having thought about it for such a long time, but I'm
| glad I built it or I'd still think the vision was a perfect match
| for reality.
|
| (Regarding the dreaming comments made by a couple of people: it
| may be true, but I've been told by family for whom I've planned
| trips manually that I do "a great job" -- they have no interest,
| and neither do I, about planning the trip but being taken along
| for the ride. So there's probably truth to both. People could
| certainly fantasize about their trip while using a tool to help
| plan it, even if it were years in the future.)
| giarc wrote:
| I generally agree with Garry's take on this.
|
| However, I have used tripit.com before and it's quite a nice
| tool. You simply email them all receipts, booking confirmations
| etc and it automatically gets added to your trip itinerary.
| However, it doesn't seem like a super successful business.
|
| The trip planning tool I need aggregates all my accommodation
| searches (Airbnb, VRBO etc) into a single place and includes all
| relevant details (rooms, bathrooms, location, features, price per
| night) and then allows multiple parties to comment. Currently we
| copy all listings over to a Google Sheet and share it with
| others. It's super cumbersome and I'd pay for a tool like this.
| tomhoward wrote:
| TripIt's been a great product for a long time, but not the kind
| of app he's talking about.
|
| The article is referring more to pre-trip planning for leisure
| travel, which is a very popular product to build but never
| successful. I've seen new ones pop up each year since I started
| working in travel 10+ years ago, and none has ever achieved
| scale.
|
| FWIW TripIt was acquired by Concur in 2011 for about $100M, so
| it was seen as valuable, at least to Concur, as they were able
| to make it part of their offering to corporate clients, which
| generate huge revenues for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| TripIt is owned by or at least integrated with Comcur which is
| owned by SAP. It's extremely useful especially for business
| travel. When you have 3 or 4 trips in various stages of
| planning it's useful to see what you've booked and what you
| haven't.
| xtqctz wrote:
| I wonder how a more competent form of Siri/Alexa/Home might
| change these market economics. If we ever come to rely on digital
| assistants for much more than the weather and turning on our
| lights, the problem of remembering goes away.
|
| "Hey Siri, book me a flight to Vancouver for next January when
| prices are below $400"
|
| "Hey Siri, show me my travel itinerary"
| Jarwain wrote:
| I've been ideating on a travel planner for a while, and one of
| my original ideas was actually along these lines. I figured I'd
| have to build out a full travel planner first, but then I found
| this (https://www.inspirock.com/) which kinda covers the
| planning part, and probably wouldn't be toooooo difficult to
| hook into a voice command
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| anything new on this since 2012 you think?
|
| Here's a bunch of previous discussion from 7 years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658
| soniman wrote:
| "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 social network app
|
| 5) I'm bored partying with my new friends, I'm going to level up
| and build an app to learn a new language
|
| 6) I'm lonely, I'm going to build a dating app to find a mate
|
| 7) I found a mate and the whole engagement/wedding industry is a
| fraud, I'm going to make an app to make it easier to navigate
|
| 8) My children are awesome, I'm going to build apps to manage
| their time/friends/eating/sleeping/learning
|
| 9) Technology is a waste of time, I'm going to spend my time on
| other hobbies and my family
|
| 10) I've been working 20 years in a boring industry and I see an
| opportunity to write boring software that solves boring problems
| that businesses will actually pay for. Jackpot.
|
| Edit: As others pointed out, should have included: ToDo app, Blog
| App, and a travel app. Travel should probably be 5 with language
| at 6."
|
| From here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508239
| rnoorda wrote:
| I agree that travel planning is a common (and often bad) startup
| idea, but I disagree with the reasoning.
|
| Part of the enjoyment of many trips, for me, is the planning. I
| get to learn about the city, see which places/activities I am
| most interested in, and gain some small level of insight into the
| location, the history, the culture, etc. I enjoy talking with
| friends about what we want to do while we're there, or asking
| what they liked last time they visited, so I don't feel a huge
| pain point here. There are certain aspects of travel I don't like
| planning, such as transportation, but that seems to be where
| travel startups have been most successful (booking flights, etc.)
|
| Similarly, travel apps don't know what I like. A museum about a
| certain artist that I'm interested in? Great! A concert for a
| musical genre I don't have strong opinions on? Meh. And while the
| software could take my interests into consideration, inputting my
| preferences to useful levels of detail adds friction to the
| process.
|
| Finally, I prefer my trips to be flexible. I rarely plan what
| restaurant I'm eating at; I'll walk around and see what looks
| good when I'm there. And if I see something near where I'm
| staying that seems interesting, I can do that instead of whatever
| I had planned for that afternoon. Travel planning generally
| strikes me as more limiting than freeing.
|
| Perhaps there is something great that just hasn't been created
| yet, or maybe my travel needs are sufficiently unique that I'm
| just not the target market, but I'm not holding my breath.
| fauria wrote:
| The article refers to leisure travel. There are multiple
| successful enterprise travel startups, such as TravelPerk:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelPerk
| kogir wrote:
| Instagram and Trello seem to be doing ok.
| trhoad wrote:
| Not too sure about this take. By this logic, the car industry
| would be bankrupt - people don't buy cars that often. Isn't the
| real issue that the spend vs. frequency is off? If I spend (on
| average) $1 a day on an app, that's a pretty good business. If I
| spend $10,000 every 10 year, that's also a good business.
| However, if I spend $1 every year, that's likely a bad business.
| It's not about how often, but how often as a function, with how
| much as the parameter.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Huh, I doubt cars is a good example. If I see the Ford logo
| every day as I pick up my car keys, and then it's under my nose
| as I hold my steering wheel, then when I buy a new car I'll
| probably consider Fords first (and maybe a terrible experience
| will make me avoid them).
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| The point, I believe, is that the car is the central thing you
| are buying; whereas the "trip planning tool" is an accessory to
| the actual thing you want (the trip itself).
| trhoad wrote:
| And a great example of this? Airbnb. Pretty much disproved the
| entire post.
| dekmetzi wrote:
| have used airbnb's planner - it's great. Admittedly, not in
| the past year - but then I haven't travelled, either.
| it wrote:
| youli.io is doing it, steadily gaining traction. Disclaimer: I
| built their mobile app.
| dang wrote:
| One past discussion:
|
| _Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea
| (2012)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 - Oct 2014
| (180 comments)
| basch wrote:
| Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well
| yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the
| entire experience holistically.
|
| A feature that rarely gets put at the top of the list is true
| collaboration. Traveling with just a spouse or with a group,
| multiple participants have different wants, needs, preferences,
| interests. Maybe one person is in charge of travel logistics, one
| in charge of food, one in charge of activity discovery.
|
| There's not enough auto scheduling where you say "we want two
| days of rest, one day of museums, and to eat out 4 time" where it
| fills in the rest.
|
| Good collaborative travel software needs voting. It needs a way
| for teams of people to make wishlists and then helps determine
| which will work out the best. Is it smart enough to notice
| between 3 people they picked 3 different mexican restaurants, so
| it should probably figure out which of those 3 is the best, or
| ask if you want to eat mexican 3 times.
|
| Maybe everyone saying it cant work just cant see how great it
| could be. If it was Apple level "it just works" a group of
| friends might click "plan a trip" and swipe through some options
| for a while, JUST FOR FUN, and an hour later have a complex
| entire everything booked. It could even include some
| Splitwise/escrow functions. It could help you use the right
| credit card for the right purchase. It could help you maximize
| points across vendors. When I travel as a family, vs when I
| travel with friend group A vs when I travel with friend group B,
| the brand of rental car may change depend on the best available
| deal given our different memberships. Ideally, this software has
| everyones usernames and passwords and knows how to access loyalty
| only pages from the vendors. Theres TONS of little complex
| interactions in travel that could be abstracted away by smart
| machines. If you think a group spreadsheet is the answer, we dont
| have the same type of friends. I'm not unleashing an 8 or 12 year
| old on the master plan vacation spreadsheet, but they can swipe
| through Orlando options all day long.
|
| A way for it to be "used every day" is for it to aggregate Yelp
| and Google Reviews, and local events and let you plan more than
| just out of town travel. "What are we doing before the concert on
| Saturday, do our babysitters have the schedule?" Another way to
| make it "used every day" is to just make it damn fun to use.
| Friend groups sitting around, swiping and daydreaming about dream
| vacations they might never take. Does nobody sit around and
| bullshit like "we should go to Florida." "I want to go to
| Nashville." "How about Gulfport." "As long as it has casinos."
| Then once an amazing trip is planned, impulse takes over and
| everybody says fuck it lets just do it. Vegas doesnt need to be
| the only impulse destination.
| rakoo wrote:
| 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 looks
| interesting, or you need to keep a tab on flight prices, you
| can just put a link to the resource with some comments. Include
| the link to the PDF of a 2-day excursion if you want. Add
| photos. Anything, really.
|
| - if you need to vote, everyone can just put their names in
| front of the proposals
|
| - with Google Docs you can even edit the same doc
| simultaneously and there is one single link that always point
| to the latest version
|
| I do agree with the fundamental insight of TFA: if you're only
| going to use it once or twice a year, you don't want to take
| days getting familiar with the tool only to forget about it the
| moment you come back. And as a developer/PM you can't have
| every single use case prepared.
|
| Sometimes it's better to just let people self-organize instead
| of trying to sell them something that's not better for them.
| basch wrote:
| >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.
| rakoo wrote:
| 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
| sigg3 wrote:
| There's definitely opportunity here, but at great - perhaps
| even prohibitive - complexity.
|
| I'm not gonna sleep tonight, am I?
| jperras wrote:
| > Good collaborative travel software needs voting. It needs a
| way for teams of people to make wishlists and then helps
| determine which will work out the best.
|
| A few years ago we built this exact thing for an airline that
| you have definitely heard of. I believe it ended up being
| shelved due to internal politics/shuffling, but it encompassed
| everything that you described except non-travel/lodging
| scheduling.
|
| The problem with these kinds of systems is that you always end
| up having to declare one person the de facto dictator/organizer
| (which effectively mimics reality), and the whole experience is
| perhaps overkill for groups of less than 6 people who would
| likely just conduct the informal planning over an SMS group
| chat.
| basch wrote:
| I dont think group tinder for restaurants is that complex,
| from the UX side.
|
| I dont see why there has to be a leader. Why cant it be a
| wikipedia style, "anybody can edit anything"? Or the option
| to have admins and just voting participants? If there must be
| a leader, why cant the AI be the leader? Or if nothing else,
| why isnt it just a pretty interface for tallying votes. "Oh,
| it seems going to a football game is way more popular of an
| idea than any of us expected."
|
| It should also take into account events happening that
| overlap the trip. If I am there week A maybe football games
| are an option, but if we are there week B maybe its a country
| concert. Is there any good local event planning for groups
| software? It could be as simple as "What showtime works for
| everyone, where are we eating, do I need to bring anything."
| Structured conversation, that learns over time.
| slim wrote:
| In 2007 I built a text highlighter service for the web. It was
| really as usable as it could be : you click a button and start
| highlighting text in the page. At the time social bookmarking
| was still relevant and my web highlighter was a better social
| bookmarking. But by examining usage patterns, I quickly
| realized it's a dead end : keeping things organized is work.
| Apart from nerds nobody would take the time and have the
| discipline to keep things organized outside the context of
| work. Once I realized that I knew del.icio.us which I was using
| every day is doomed. And I think that travel planning software
| is doomed for the same reason not because use frequency is low.
| Leisure is the wrong context for planning software.
| ozim wrote:
| Don't want to be offensive but your insight is not really
| insightful.
|
| Why?
|
| Because it goes in totally wrong direction.
|
| Most people don't want to work on stuff or plan the trip - they
| want to pick up the phone, tell what they want and have it
| organized. Organizing or even putting your wishes into some
| forms is work and that is not what people want ... they want to
| have VACATIONS and not fill in some application forms.
|
| I work in insurance area - my business people would like to
| make forms so business owners can fill in what they have and
| what they need in some magic form and that software does the
| rest. Removing middle people who pick up the phones and moving
| work of filling in details to the customer.
|
| I see it is not working because business owner wants to call
| someone, tell him "I have a bakery, I want insurance" and be
| done with it. Because he is busy making bread, he does not give
| a damn about your risk compliance process.
|
| Last point is - people also don't want to pay the real price
| for what it takes to have custom vacations organized - that
| most people pay for all inclusive in some resort go to swimming
| pool, have Swedish table and they are happy with it, because
| they don't have to think about anything and they have all
| organized.
|
| "All inclusive" is shitty vacation by my standard and I like
| custom trips but I go into so custom stuff that you don't have
| database for that because no one is going into those places
| because of what I wrote earlier.
|
| There is no business in travel planning because it is people
| who are into custom stuff they want to do themselves (and don't
| pay) niche or get "all inclusive" and don't care about anything
| whales. Maybe there are some people somewhere in between but I
| don't think you are getting money out of them.
| zerr wrote:
| What about products for travel agencies? B2B that is...
| ozim wrote:
| I think there is quite cutthroat competition there already
| financed by people who own travel agencies.
|
| You probably don't have a chance as an outsider.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head, and I find it applies so
| many more things in life than just travel. It is my general
| observation that many people, as they progress through their
| life, reach the stage where they have more disposable income
| than time. And suddenly, all that tech fascination with self-
| service becomes extremely annoying.
|
| I have personal examples from "the other side" for the cases
| you give.
|
| Insurance-wise, I've been procrastinating on getting some of
| the belongings we have at home insured, because the insurance
| agent keeps coming back to me with calculations and offers I
| need to look at. But I have neither time nor patience to deal
| with it - especially not to study PDFs with tables full of
| calculations that were explicitly designed to be hard to
| compare[0]. The only interaction I wanted to have is, "this
| is where we live, this is the stuff we want insured, tell me
| how much to pay and where to send the money". They're losing
| money because they try to give me opportunity to save
| money[1].
|
| Travel-wise, my wife and I both always looked down on people
| going on all-inclusives - but we took a chance and went on
| our first-ever all-inclusive a few years ago. We were
| immediately sold on the concept. It wasn't even a _good_ all-
| inclusive - it was the cheapest one we could find, and the
| resort smelled like goats half the time - but it was the
| first time we _actually rested_. The amount of bullshit that
| goes into vacations is hard to even imagine until you
| experience being free of it. Even having to make a decision
| when, where and what to eat on a given day is a hidden source
| of background anxiety. On an all-inclusive, the only thing
| you need to worry about is what to do with all the worry-free
| leisure time you have.
|
| So yeah, I agree with your conclusions. And in particular:
|
| > _people who are into custom stuff they want to do
| themselves (and don 't pay) niche or get "all inclusive" and
| don't care about anything whales_
|
| Sometimes, perhaps often, those might be the same people.
| Personally, my all-inclusive experience convinced me that I
| should mentally separate the type of travel I want into
| categories. If I want to explore something niche, I'll
| continue to plan it myself. If I want to _actually rest_ ,
| I'll reach for the most bullshit-free all-inclusive
| experience I can get - as close as possible to "wire some
| money and be told what plane to catch".
|
| (Though calling all-inclusive travelers "whales" is perhaps
| exaggerated - all-inclusives are _ridiculously cheap_ these
| days, if you 're willing to make compromises on luxury looks
| and you book far ahead in advance.)
|
| --
|
| [0] - Because, of course, businesses are douchy like that.
|
| [1] - Or, perhaps, to fail at saving money - because, again,
| businesses are douchy like that.
| basch wrote:
| >they want to pick up the phone, tell what they want and have
| it organized.
|
| Only because nothing better has come along. I know plenty of
| people who basically refuse to make phone calls. Cant order
| online, they will go to a different restaurant.
|
| >Organizing or even putting your wishes into some forms
|
| Exactly why it needs to be swipes.
|
| Open the App
|
| Invite Friends
|
| Swipe Destinations
|
| Click on destinations to swipe activities. Restaurants.
| Pretty pictures.
|
| If its more complex than Tinder or TikTok or Pinterest youre
| right it wont be FUN to use. The whole point is that the act
| of planning itself should be pleasurable.
|
| People love endless feeds of pretty pictures.
|
| The fact that peoples responses are forms and spreadsheets
| tells me I havent explained myself well.
|
| It doesnt need to be travel only. I use Yelp and Uber at
| home, and away from home.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't know what is about swipes but those are underused I
| agree. Does Tinder have some kind of patent on swiping
| decisions?
|
| What you describe here is in my opinion more interesting.
| Because that would be more like choosing which "all
| inclusive" most of people want. If typing is cut to minimum
| and as you mention there are mostly pretty pictures that
| one has to swipe left or right it might work.
| basch wrote:
| Not only are swipes underused to build consensus, I dont
| even believe Tinder is the best example. Baby name apps
| are. A couple download an app, join a meeting room and
| swipe. Common names appear on a list.
|
| Now imagine that a restaurant picker could determine
| whether you never want mexican or dont want mexican
| today.
|
| Swipes are too often thought of as a binary left/right,
| when really they are more of a radial menu. Swipe left-up
| could mean not this time. Swipe left-down means never.
| Swipe straight up to signify something as to come back
| to. Swiping is easily 4 to 6 to 8 different outputs of
| vote. The screen should represent a different color for
| each one until you let go, so you know which option you
| are releasing on. Things like Maya have had radial menus
| forever. If you built true swiping radial menus, you can
| even have a second later of options once the first has
| been hovered over for a while.
| ozim wrote:
| I would not go into radial menu unless it is some kind of
| specialist app. I would cut it down to left/right up/down
| - yes tinder is quite binary and does not have "maybe" as
| an option.
|
| Still you have to build database of choices which will
| cost quite some money.
|
| Tinder has this upside that their database of choices is
| building on its own.
| basch wrote:
| Technically tinder is already more than binary, as
| upswipe is a different form of positive swipe than right
| swipe. It works there. Theres really no reason that
| throwing a picture to one of the four corners cant work.
| killion wrote:
| I built exactly what you describe at Flights With Friends. But
| the thing I learned is that group trips are not a democracy.
| Trips without a dictator who makes the decisions don't actually
| happen.
|
| Building tools for the dictator is hard because getting the
| other group members who are not the dictator to actually use
| any tool is too much work. You are always dependent on the
| least reliable member of the group.
|
| This is the exact reason that travel cost splitting tools don't
| work and the dictator just ends up paying for everything and
| getting the group members to pay them back. If they used a bill
| splitting tool the flights and hotels would sell out before the
| slowest member of the group put in their credit card.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| As the self-declared benevolent dictator for several trips
| I've planned, I agree with a lot of what you said.
|
| I've led a couple of great group trips to places I'm
| passionate about by emailing a group of friends and
| essentially saying "I'm going to go to X, here's what I think
| is amazing about X, and here are the proposed dates", and
| essentially getting folks to opt-in or not. Once the trip is
| locked in, there's certainly some discussion and folks say "I
| heard there's Y in X, let's do that!" and there's probably
| time to for that activity. But yeah, you need one master of
| the itinerary.
|
| I do disagree somewhat about the cost splitting thing though
| - I've had several good experiences using SplitWise, although
| the groups have been relatively small - from 3 to 6 people or
| so. Maybe if you have more people, or weird family dynamics,
| or technophobes, it doesn't work out.
| killion wrote:
| You are absolutely correct - Splitwise is great. I was
| thinking about the failed startups that did the splitting
| before the trip and then pay the vendors directly.
| Splitwise makes the process of getting reimbursed much
| better.
|
| Also benevolent is the right prefix for dictator in this
| case. This person's reputation is on the line and they are
| working hard to make sure their friends/family have a great
| vacation.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| >Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well
| yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the
| entire experience holistically.
|
| That's actually the exact opposite of the conclusion I came to.
| I think the do-it-all travel planner apps have never worked for
| me because there's some aspect of planning I want to do
| differently or some case they didn't think of, so I end up
| feeling like the entire product doesn't work for me.
|
| The apps I've repeatedly used for travel are smaller or more
| general than just travel - I've used Splitwise a number of
| times on group trips (or at times even when a trip isn't
| involved) to equitably split costs. It doesn't do anything
| else, but it does its thing well. And I've certainly made use
| of a lot of shared Google Docs to collaborate on itineraries or
| packing lists, etc. I don't feel like I need a travel-specific
| chore coordinator app when I can just have a shared spreadsheet
| that lists which couple is making dinner which night at the ski
| house. There are a few web-based road trip planners I've used
| that seem to do a nicer job than just Google Maps for multi-day
| road trips with many stops, but of course not all trips fall
| into that category.
|
| So yeah, I think a la carte solutions for different aspects of
| travel planning work ok for me - find a niche and do that one
| thing really well.
| phsource wrote:
| 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
| ska wrote:
| You don't have to be just better than google sheets; you have
| to be a lot better than google sheets while also not
| introducing significantly more friction. Ideally none.
|
| I think the space is hard because it involves tying together a
| number of different functionalities many of which are rarely
| done well, some which have never been done well.
|
| Good luck! (meant sincerely).
| dakial1 wrote:
| Like many here I also had an Trip Planner idea, also because I
| was solving my own pain point, to accurately create a feasible
| schedule for trips. My MVP (which is actually my travel planner)
| is a simple Google Spreadsheet that uses Google Maps API to
| calculate drive times between destinations (I like to do car
| trips). So i simply use it to put each destination, calculate
| driving tim and time at destination to fit the most destinations
| inside a day. It could become a product if it had access to a
| huge destinations database (like tripadvisor, Gmaps, etc.) with
| infos like "estimated visiting time", cost, etc... But I came to
| the same conclusion as Garry, this wouldn't be something that
| would appeal to many people.
|
| Here is the link for the spreadsheet for the curious (you'll need
| a Google Maps Api key):
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1...
| Graffur wrote:
| 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
|
| * Get my bike serviced
| lostinquebec wrote:
| > Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea
| (2012) <------
|
| 2012. Can you name a travel planning startup in the last 9
| years?
| sentinel wrote:
| Besides the point in the article, I want to point out how good
| the writing is. The author captured me from the first sentence
| and I read all the way thru.
| keeptrying wrote:
| 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.
| postsantum wrote:
| What's wrong with dating websites? The only thing I can think
| of is how saturated this space is
| neither_color wrote:
| _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.
| munificent wrote:
| This is a good observation. I don't know if there's a name for
| this psychological effect, but I observe it in many areas of
| life. The basic rule is:
|
| _The fewer future choices you think you will have, the more
| risk-averse you will be when making the current one._
|
| You're more willing to roll the die and lose if you know you'll
| get more rolls in the future. Americans generally take fewer
| vacations than Europeans, so the opportunity cost of a single
| trip is higher. Because of that, it's natural to choose safer
| known vacations. Trying out someplace new and running the risk
| of it going poorly is harder to swallow when that may be your
| own significant trip in a year or two.
|
| A European is more likely to gamble on a new destination
| because if it doesn't work out, well, they've got a couple more
| trips coming soon to even it all out.
|
| (Also, there is the practical matter that Europeans have access
| to a much wider variety of vacations for less money because
| everything is smaller and closer. Americans _do_ in fact
| vacation in a wide variety of places, but those are usually
| different states in the US, which is mostly invisible to
| Europeans. Most people in the US have visited a number of other
| states.)
| np- wrote:
| 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.
| llampx wrote:
| The author doesn't seem to go into why travel-planning software
| is not successful, except for that it isn't discoverable since
| people only use it once in a while. I think the same can be said
| for a lot of services, like handymen (Angie's List)
|
| One other reason is I think that travel planning is hard. Getting
| multiple people to agree on a destination, hotel, fares etc is
| all hard work. So most people only plan things with people whom
| they're familiar with, like close friends and family. If there's
| already a communication channel open like texting or Whatsapp etc
| it makes no sense to introduce more friction by having travel
| discussion go through a different channel. I remember an app for
| couple communication, Between. It had a similar problem. Why add
| another communication channel?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Surely there's a way to do it better than just over text? It's
| a 4-dimensional (time and space) experience isn't it: "After
| lunch on day 2 of the vacation, what attraction do you want to
| visit?", or, "When do we have time to squeeze a visit in that
| cafe that all the Instagrammers post about? [Yeah, like it or
| not this is the reality]".
|
| A Miro[1]-like collaborative map would be interesting, every
| participant of the trip can vote what they want to see, the app
| can calculate the best itenerary (route and time), maybe even
| split up the group if some members are really not interested in
| some things (e.g. a visit to the local football team's museum,
| or the 5-star steak restaurant where there are vegan members).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's more than a 4-dimensional space - it's a probability
| distribution over 4-dimensional space, one that you want to
| explore ahead of time, and you never really know for sure
| where you're on it until your trip is over. I'm yet to see a
| planning tool that handles this.
|
| What I mean by the "probability distribution" part is, your
| trip plan isn't really a specific plan - it's a set of
| possible plans. You may have concerns like, "what if we
| arrive late on the first day?", or "what if the main
| attraction for the 2nd day is closed", or "we're not sure at
| this point where we'll eat", or "oh crap, it's raining today,
| what do we do?", etc. You have to navigate these questions in
| your head. I'd love to have a tool that makes this easier.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| This is a great quote!
|
| _I only have a finite number of slots in my brain. If I don 't
| remember it, I won't use it._
|
| Why do I feel like computer industry people turn a blind eye
| toward this? It may be that successful tech people have
| practically infinite slots in their brains, so they aren't
| sympathetic to us regular people that do not. An example is the
| common question "Why didn't you use [X framework] to do this?" as
| if the possibility of answering "because I didn't know [X
| framework] existed" would be absurd.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| You are supposed to be a full-stack developer (also a
| DevSecOpsManagerJanitorEverything), so that means all
| frameworks for all possible parts of the application.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| In no small part, because the "slots" don't seem relevant in
| many cases. I couldn't tell you my dentist's name right now,
| but it's there, saved in my phone in case I need care tomorrow.
| Travel planning sites would be forgotten on my computer as a
| bookmark. Etc.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| 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
| OJFord wrote:
| 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, ...)
| tomhoward wrote:
| Fun fact. When Garry posted this, I immediately sent him the
| pitch doc for my company's travel planning app, which I was
| convinced had cracked the code and overcome the issue he'd
| written about. Surprise surprise, we hadn't. And 9 years on,
| neither has anyone else, perhaps apart from players that were
| already big in travel then like Tripadvisor, and Google, which
| has the scale to succeed at anything if it makes them money,
| which travel does given how deeply they can insert themselves
| into the transaction path.
| modeless wrote:
| I thought it was task tracking software.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 10 years ago it was todo lists.
| postsantum wrote:
| Still going strong, at least in my circles. Kind of
| depressing to see bright people inventing another app with a
| checkbox on its icon
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I haven't heard of anyone building this, is this what
| enterprise types are doing? Like a Jira or Monday.com?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| 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).
| cortesoft wrote:
| There seem to be a number of successful companies in the travel
| space... are they not actually?
| giarc wrote:
| He's not referring to trip planning as in Expedia, Kayak etc,
| those are trip booking. He's referring to tools that allow you
| to plan trips with friends (ex. Monday we are going to eat
| here, Tuesday take a trip here, stay at this hotel, take these
| flights).
| koboll wrote:
| Tell that to Pieter Levels, who's made a fortune off travel
| planning software as a one-man shop.
| blahblahblogger wrote:
| > 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?
| stemuk wrote:
| I think in some ways this is also a question of specialized vs
| universal tools. If I plan a vacation with friends I believe I
| could do it 90% of the way just as well with a plain old shared
| word document/todo list.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| 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.
| tomhoward wrote:
| 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 spend invest large 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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