15 ms·

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

236 points by domrdy 5y ago

kogir 5y ago
Instagram and Trello seem to be doing ok.
keeptrying 5y ago
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 5y ago
  What's wrong with dating websites? The only thing I can think of is how saturated this space is
modeless 5y ago
I thought it was task tracking software.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  10 years ago it was todo lists.
  - postsantum 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  I haven't heard of anyone building this, is this what enterprise types are doing? Like a Jira or Monday.com?
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    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 5y ago
There seem to be a number of successful companies in the travel space... are they not actually?
- giarc 5y ago
  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).
theonlybutlet 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 invest huge 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.
smnrchrds 5y ago
It needs a 2012 tag. I was excited to see what Yahoo trip planner does, only to find out it was discontinued long ago.
- domrdy 5y ago
  Apologies. I will add the correct tag next time.
- toast0 5y 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.yahoo.com/trip-view-1939312-hawaiian_honeymoon_august_09 https://web.archive.org/web/20111027022849/http://travel.yah... and their trip journal https://web.archive.org/web/20111103064256/http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-journal-1939312-hawaiian_honeymoon_august_09 https://web.archive.org/web/20111103064256/http://travel.yah...
fauria 5y ago
The article refers to leisure travel. There are multiple successful enterprise travel startups, such as TravelPerk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelPerk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelPerk
neither_color 5y ago
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-hong-kong/ 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 5y ago
  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.)
llampx 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 café 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    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.
tomhoward 5y ago
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.
ebiester 5y ago
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.
giarc 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Yeah. After I read everything more carefully, TripIt which I use is more in the vein of keeping track of business trips than pre-planning. Which I mostly don’t need software for especially for personal trips.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      I’ve used tripit for personal travel but it was a very long 2 week multi leg trip with 10+ flights so really needed the collation.
- ghaff 5y ago
  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.
trhoad 5y ago
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.
- trhoad 5y ago
  And a great example of this? Airbnb. Pretty much disproved the entire post.
  - dekmetzi 5y ago
    have used airbnb's planner - it's great. Admittedly, not in the past year - but then I haven't travelled, either.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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).
basch 5y ago
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.
- 5y ago
killion 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - basch 5y ago
    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.
jrm4 5y ago
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.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  One made it to Shark Tank (no deal): https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/ https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/
- rnoorda 5y ago
  Just use normal Tinder, and ask every match to a date playing basketball! The problem solves itself.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    As wisely said, “the ‘Facebook for X’ is Facebook”.
    - bloodyplonker22 5y ago
      True, except for LinkedIn because you can't post your drunken ragers and be professional all at once.
      - travoc 5y ago
        You’d be surprised what has become popular on LinkedIn.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The contrapositive of "every website is a dating website if you try hard enough"
- akor 5y ago
  I'm not sure I'd say it's most common but I'd nominate event ticketing as a common bad startup idea.
jmartens 5y ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658
it 5y ago
youli.io is doing it, steadily gaining traction. Disclaimer: I built their mobile app.
stemuk 5y ago
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.
rnoorda 5y ago
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.
firemelt 5y ago
damn I also have this bad idea before lol
koboll 5y ago
Tell that to Pieter Levels, who's made a fortune off travel planning software as a one-man shop.
- blahblahblogger 5y ago
  > 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?
thehappypm 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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...)
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It creates a central plan based on what I’ve booked.
cubano 5y ago
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.
weedpeg 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.
MarkLowenstein 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
OJFord 5y ago
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, ...)
maerF0x0 5y ago
> 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...
- lovegoblin 5y ago
  > > 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.
- manacit 5y ago
  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 5y ago
phsource 5y ago
Oh boy -- I'm the cofounder of Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com 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 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-travel-planning-startup https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never-consider-a-t... - https://paansm.medium.com/the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-startup-will-fail-e60c53e70ea8 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 5y ago
  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).
- d--b 5y ago
  Neato, this looks great. Small(ish) request, can you add weather info in there? Always super important to know to reshuffle activities properly.
  - phsource 5y ago
dakial1 5y ago
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/16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1TQE_kMb0K8Xf_eYBIoEFmD4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1...
sentinel 5y ago
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.
browningstreet 5y ago
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.
pilingual 5y ago
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.)
xtqctz 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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/ https://www.inspirock.com/) which kinda covers the planning part, and probably wouldn't be toooooo difficult to hook into a voice command
wly_cdgr 5y ago
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
Existenceblinks 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
temporalparts 5y ago
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.
- monksy 5y ago
  That and identifying how you connect between the places. There is a major cost difference based on where you're flying to and where you're flying out of.
- nicbou 5y ago
  I also travel a lot, but by motorcycle. Personally, I put everything interesting on a map, and make a custom route that goes through it. In cities, I make itineraries on the fly, based on my mood. I don't need to see everything - not in 2-3 days. What I'd really need is a map that combines route planning (Google My Maps), marker collection (Google Maps), exploration (Google Trips or Wikivoyage), area weather (Ventusky), and average weather for the time of the year. Other niceties would include border control requirements and COVID restrictions. I think that this illustrates how wildly different everyone's travel planning is.
Graffur 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) <------ 2012. Can you name a travel planning startup in the last 9 years?
  - Graffur 5y ago
    2012. Can I name a <random category> startup in the last 9 years? Probably not. Hipmunk is the only one to come to mind but it's from pre 2012
soniman 5y ago
"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508239
- onwardly 5y ago
  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).
dang 5y ago
One past discussion: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 - Oct 2014 (180 comments)
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Ok, but why the @#% doesn't Facebook make it easy to know which of my old friends are living in cities I visit? I swear that would be the one obviously useful thing about Facebook.
- nharada 5y ago
  The craziest thing is they used to make this easy with the social graph search or whatever they called it. Now if it's possible it's really hidden.
  - yosito 5y ago
    There is a nearby friends map, but it only works for people who have consented for Facebook to track their location 24/7. I've played around with building an app that uses the Facebook API (and other social networks) to get people's current "Lives in" city, and location updates from recent posts, and aggregate them all in a map. I found it a bit hard to get this information from the APIs, and never had the time to figure out how to get it to work.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      I dislike FB sooooooo much. It sucks all the air out of the room for online social engagements.
teliskr 5y ago
This article made me chuckle. It is spot on. I worked at a trip planning startup around 2006 - 2007. A lot of money was burned, fortunately it wasn’t mine!
Misdicorl 5y ago
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.
- savrajsingh 5y ago
  I’ve had the same idea. It’s a good one.
- yosito 5y ago
  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.
  - Misdicorl 5y ago
    This requires me to know where along the path to search. But that's specifically what I don't know
monsieurpng 5y ago
My team is working on an AI powered travel planning app, which addresses some of the issues in the article. We like to invite hacker news audience to try it out and give us feedback. Download here https://unatravel.ai/una-travel-planner/ https://unatravel.ai/una-travel-planner/
throwdbaaway 5y ago
Similarly, if the best use case of your software is to help with trip planning, it is not going to end well either: > At LinuxCon last year, Carl Symon showed me a screen shot of an Activity created by Aaron Seigo to plan his holiday, which included a To Do list, a calendar, links to online travel guides, a weather report for his destination, and other features connected to the trip. https://www.datamation.com/open-source/the-mystery-of-kde-activities/ https://www.datamation.com/open-source/the-mystery-of-kde-ac...
john_minsk 5y ago
Omg. What a crazy article. 20% daily retention? Daily usage? If I have an app on my phone that I open once a quarter and it delivers me a ton of value => I will happily pay for it monthly. The travel planning does not provide such value at least to me. I’m already spending a ton of money on hotels, planes and transport as well as I do my research before the trip. Somewhere along this journey and from this money I spend on hotels and stuff there should be this service to help you plan your trip. Update: i remember maps.me had this in their model - they wanted to sell you guides on the platform that you can then go through with GPS. Nice idea, but it had to be subscription so that user could explore these options as he prefers, not after buying the guide…
- koonsolo 5y ago
  I cannot imagine airbnb having a 20% daily retention, yet they seem to be doing fine.
sfusato 5y ago
I believe such a travel planning software would have more traction if coupled with the local destination management system, as the locals (curators) would curate the information on events happening in the area, things to see & do etc. Then, you would just browse their website, and simply add things to your itinerary. Has an event been cancelled, or postponed? Bang, you would be alerted immediately and your itinerary would reflect it. You can't schedule a museum visit on off hours etc. Without curators, which are locally incentivized experts, the traveler would have to work on getting and keeping everything organized. Some actually do like this research part, but most don't. How do you bridge the gap between curators and travelers? For the 1st group, it's their work time, for the 2nd group it's supposed to be their vacation time. Kinda like a concierge service in some aspects.
timwis 5y ago
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.

236 points by domrdy 5y ago

Instagram and Trello seem to be doing ok.

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 5y ago
What's wrong with dating websites? The only thing I can think of is how saturated this space is

modeless 5y ago

I thought it was task tracking software.

mrweasel 5y ago
10 years ago it was todo lists.
- postsantum 5y ago
  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 5y ago
I haven't heard of anyone building this, is this what enterprise types are doing? Like a Jira or Monday.com?
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  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 5y ago

There seem to be a number of successful companies in the travel space... are they not actually?

giarc 5y ago
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).

theonlybutlet 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 invest huge 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.

smnrchrds 5y ago

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

domrdy 5y ago
Apologies. I will add the correct tag next time.
toast0 5y 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.yahoo.com/trip-view-1939312-hawaiian_honeymoon_august_09 https://web.archive.org/web/20111027022849/http://travel.yah... and their trip journal https://web.archive.org/web/20111103064256/http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-journal-1939312-hawaiian_honeymoon_august_09 https://web.archive.org/web/20111103064256/http://travel.yah...

fauria 5y ago

The article refers to leisure travel. There are multiple successful enterprise travel startups, such as TravelPerk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelPerk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelPerk

neither_color 5y ago

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-hong-kong/ 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 5y ago
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.)

llampx 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 café 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  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.

tomhoward 5y ago

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.

ebiester 5y ago

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.

giarc 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Yeah. After I read everything more carefully, TripIt which I use is more in the vein of keeping track of business trips than pre-planning. Which I mostly don’t need software for especially for personal trips.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    I’ve used tripit for personal travel but it was a very long 2 week multi leg trip with 10+ flights so really needed the collation.
ghaff 5y ago
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.

trhoad 5y ago

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.

trhoad 5y ago
And a great example of this? Airbnb. Pretty much disproved the entire post.
- dekmetzi 5y ago
  have used airbnb's planner - it's great. Admittedly, not in the past year - but then I haven't travelled, either.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
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 5y ago
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).

basch 5y ago

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.

5y ago

killion 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- basch 5y ago
  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.

jrm4 5y ago

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.

sokoloff 5y ago
One made it to Shark Tank (no deal): https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/ https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/
rnoorda 5y ago
Just use normal Tinder, and ask every match to a date playing basketball! The problem solves itself.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  As wisely said, “the ‘Facebook for X’ is Facebook”.
  - bloodyplonker22 5y ago
    True, except for LinkedIn because you can't post your drunken ragers and be professional all at once.
    - travoc 5y ago
      You’d be surprised what has become popular on LinkedIn.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  The contrapositive of "every website is a dating website if you try hard enough"
akor 5y ago
I'm not sure I'd say it's most common but I'd nominate event ticketing as a common bad startup idea.

jmartens 5y ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658

it 5y ago

youli.io is doing it, steadily gaining traction. Disclaimer: I built their mobile app.

stemuk 5y ago

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.

rnoorda 5y ago

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.

firemelt 5y ago

damn I also have this bad idea before lol

koboll 5y ago

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

blahblahblogger 5y ago
> 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?

thehappypm 5y ago

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 5y ago
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...)
- thehappypm 5y ago
  It creates a central plan based on what I’ve booked.

cubano 5y ago

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.

weedpeg 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago

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.

MarkLowenstein 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.

OJFord 5y ago

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, ...)

maerF0x0 5y ago

> 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...

lovegoblin 5y ago
> > 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.
manacit 5y ago
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 5y ago

phsource 5y ago

Oh boy -- I'm the cofounder of Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com 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 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-travel-planning-startup https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never-consider-a-t... - https://paansm.medium.com/the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-startup-will-fail-e60c53e70ea8 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 5y ago
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).
d--b 5y ago
Neato, this looks great. Small(ish) request, can you add weather info in there? Always super important to know to reshuffle activities properly.
- phsource 5y ago

dakial1 5y ago

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/16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1TQE_kMb0K8Xf_eYBIoEFmD4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1...

sentinel 5y ago

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.

browningstreet 5y ago

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.

pilingual 5y ago

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.)

xtqctz 5y ago

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 5y ago
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/ https://www.inspirock.com/) which kinda covers the planning part, and probably wouldn't be toooooo difficult to hook into a voice command

wly_cdgr 5y ago

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

Existenceblinks 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

temporalparts 5y ago

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.

monksy 5y ago
That and identifying how you connect between the places. There is a major cost difference based on where you're flying to and where you're flying out of.
nicbou 5y ago
I also travel a lot, but by motorcycle. Personally, I put everything interesting on a map, and make a custom route that goes through it. In cities, I make itineraries on the fly, based on my mood. I don't need to see everything - not in 2-3 days. What I'd really need is a map that combines route planning (Google My Maps), marker collection (Google Maps), exploration (Google Trips or Wikivoyage), area weather (Ventusky), and average weather for the time of the year. Other niceties would include border control requirements and COVID restrictions. I think that this illustrates how wildly different everyone's travel planning is.

Graffur 5y ago

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 5y ago
> Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) <------ 2012. Can you name a travel planning startup in the last 9 years?
- Graffur 5y ago
  2012. Can I name a <random category> startup in the last 9 years? Probably not. Hipmunk is the only one to come to mind but it's from pre 2012

soniman 5y ago

"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508239

onwardly 5y ago
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).

dang 5y ago

One past discussion: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 - Oct 2014 (180 comments)

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Ok, but why the @#% doesn't Facebook make it easy to know which of my old friends are living in cities I visit? I swear that would be the one obviously useful thing about Facebook.

nharada 5y ago
The craziest thing is they used to make this easy with the social graph search or whatever they called it. Now if it's possible it's really hidden.
- yosito 5y ago
  There is a nearby friends map, but it only works for people who have consented for Facebook to track their location 24/7. I've played around with building an app that uses the Facebook API (and other social networks) to get people's current "Lives in" city, and location updates from recent posts, and aggregate them all in a map. I found it a bit hard to get this information from the APIs, and never had the time to figure out how to get it to work.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I dislike FB sooooooo much. It sucks all the air out of the room for online social engagements.

teliskr 5y ago

This article made me chuckle. It is spot on. I worked at a trip planning startup around 2006 - 2007. A lot of money was burned, fortunately it wasn’t mine!

Misdicorl 5y ago

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.

savrajsingh 5y ago
I’ve had the same idea. It’s a good one.
yosito 5y ago
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.
- Misdicorl 5y ago
  This requires me to know where along the path to search. But that's specifically what I don't know

monsieurpng 5y ago

My team is working on an AI powered travel planning app, which addresses some of the issues in the article. We like to invite hacker news audience to try it out and give us feedback. Download here https://unatravel.ai/una-travel-planner/ https://unatravel.ai/una-travel-planner/

throwdbaaway 5y ago

Similarly, if the best use case of your software is to help with trip planning, it is not going to end well either: > At LinuxCon last year, Carl Symon showed me a screen shot of an Activity created by Aaron Seigo to plan his holiday, which included a To Do list, a calendar, links to online travel guides, a weather report for his destination, and other features connected to the trip. https://www.datamation.com/open-source/the-mystery-of-kde-activities/ https://www.datamation.com/open-source/the-mystery-of-kde-ac...

john_minsk 5y ago

Omg. What a crazy article. 20% daily retention? Daily usage? If I have an app on my phone that I open once a quarter and it delivers me a ton of value => I will happily pay for it monthly. The travel planning does not provide such value at least to me. I’m already spending a ton of money on hotels, planes and transport as well as I do my research before the trip. Somewhere along this journey and from this money I spend on hotels and stuff there should be this service to help you plan your trip. Update: i remember maps.me had this in their model - they wanted to sell you guides on the platform that you can then go through with GPS. Nice idea, but it had to be subscription so that user could explore these options as he prefers, not after buying the guide…

koonsolo 5y ago
I cannot imagine airbnb having a 20% daily retention, yet they seem to be doing fine.

sfusato 5y ago

I believe such a travel planning software would have more traction if coupled with the local destination management system, as the locals (curators) would curate the information on events happening in the area, things to see & do etc. Then, you would just browse their website, and simply add things to your itinerary. Has an event been cancelled, or postponed? Bang, you would be alerted immediately and your itinerary would reflect it. You can't schedule a museum visit on off hours etc. Without curators, which are locally incentivized experts, the traveler would have to work on getting and keeping everything organized. Some actually do like this research part, but most don't. How do you bridge the gap between curators and travelers? For the 1st group, it's their work time, for the 2nd group it's supposed to be their vacation time. Kinda like a concierge service in some aspects.

timwis 5y ago

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.