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

236 点作者 domrdy超过 3 年前

50 条评论

killion超过 3 年前
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&#x27;t the cause of these product failures.<p>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&#x27;t make that more fun for them.<p>If someone made a tool that was better than planning your trip in your head it doesn&#x27;t matter that you aren&#x27;t taking a trip all the time. Because most people are always planning their next trip in their mind.<p>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&#x27;t make available online.
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phsource超过 3 年前
Oh boy -- I&#x27;m the cofounder of Wanderlog (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wanderlog.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wanderlog.com</a>), a YC W19 startup exactly focused on planning travel. And I&#x27;ve really read all these articles<p>This originally was big on Hacker News in 2014: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658</a><p>This is really just the latest in a long list of articles about why travel planning startups aren&#x27;t worth pursuing:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phocuswire.com&#x2F;Why-you-should-never-consider-a-travel-planning-startup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phocuswire.com&#x2F;Why-you-should-never-consider-a-t...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paansm.medium.com&#x2F;the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-startup-will-fail-e60c53e70ea8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paansm.medium.com&#x2F;the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-star...</a><p>But we&#x27;re still at it and have grown a ton over the past year!<p>- On frequency: I think we&#x27;re underestimating folks&#x27; ability to remember here! If the product actually is good, people will remember it.<p>- On being a real pain point: It&#x27;s true that people have many &quot;good enough&quot; 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&#x27;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<p>Still, it&#x27;s instructive that none of the links in the 2014 post&#x27;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
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maerF0x0超过 3 年前
&gt; How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you&#x27;re lucky.<p>One thing I think all founders&#x2F;Product people should consider is that there are off label(so to speak) uses for everything.<p>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 &lt;gender&gt; this week?<p>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.<p>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&#x27;re viewing lots of houses with pools? Sell them an above ground pool and a luxurious lounge chair...
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tomhoward超过 3 年前
Fun fact. When Garry posted this, I immediately sent him the pitch doc for my company&#x27;s travel planning app, which I was convinced had cracked the code and overcome the issue he&#x27;d written about. Surprise surprise, we hadn&#x27;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.
temporalparts超过 3 年前
This might get buried, but I&#x27;ll put this idea out there.<p>Background:<p>I&#x27;m someone who has traveled fairly regularly (&gt; 30 countries), with some trips comprised of solo backpacking across Europe or South-East Asia. I also think I&#x27;m really good at planning, which is largely about constraint optimizing and solving some version of TSP (traveling salesman).<p>The idea:<p>You&#x27;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 &#x2F; dinner, etc.<p>I would personally find this really useful because it would replace hours that I spend optimizing my travels.
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pilingual超过 3 年前
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&amp;A. So I don&#x27;t think these blog posts are particularly valuable except to stop someone who isn&#x27;t creative enough to break away from the typical path successfully.<p>I created a failed travel app which was pitched as &quot;Tinder for Travel&quot; (also an unsuccessful pitch as some people thought it was Tinder while you are traveling, but wouldn&#x27;t that just be Tinder?).<p>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.<p>The app was too broad, imo. If it were to be successful, it probably needed to start as a feature. One idea the app&#x27;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!).<p>I believe there is something to the staycation idea, as it is exactly what you&#x27;d want on a vacation as well. It&#x27;s too nebulous even after having thought about it for such a long time, but I&#x27;m glad I built it or I&#x27;d still think the vision was a perfect match for reality.<p>(Regarding the dreaming comments made by a couple of people: it may be true, but I&#x27;ve been told by family for whom I&#x27;ve planned trips manually that I do &quot;a great job&quot; -- they have no interest, and neither do I, about planning the trip but being taken along for the ride. So there&#x27;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.)
jrm4超过 3 年前
Again, I gotta nominate &quot;Tinder, but for pickup basketball&quot; 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.
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llampx超过 3 年前
The author doesn&#x27;t seem to go into why travel-planning software is not successful, except for that it isn&#x27;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&#x27;s List)<p>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&#x27;re familiar with, like close friends and family. If there&#x27;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?
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soniman超过 3 年前
&quot;Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana.<p>1) I&#x27;m in college and I&#x27;m going to build an app to easily buy and sell books<p>2) Off campus housing is hard, I&#x27;m going to build an app to find roommates<p>3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I&#x27;m going to build an app for cost splitting<p>4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren&#x27;t social, I&#x27;m going to build a social network app<p>5) I&#x27;m bored partying with my new friends, I&#x27;m going to level up and build an app to learn a new language<p>6) I&#x27;m lonely, I&#x27;m going to build a dating app to find a mate<p>7) I found a mate and the whole engagement&#x2F;wedding industry is a fraud, I&#x27;m going to make an app to make it easier to navigate<p>8) My children are awesome, I&#x27;m going to build apps to manage their time&#x2F;friends&#x2F;eating&#x2F;sleeping&#x2F;learning<p>9) Technology is a waste of time, I&#x27;m going to spend my time on other hobbies and my family<p>10) I&#x27;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.<p>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.&quot;<p>From here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15508239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15508239</a>
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giarc超过 3 年前
I generally agree with Garry&#x27;s take on this.<p>However, I have used tripit.com before and it&#x27;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&#x27;t seem like a super successful business.<p>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&#x27;s super cumbersome and I&#x27;d pay for a tool like this.
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Existenceblinks超过 3 年前
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, &quot;is there any bus&quot; anxiety. Unexpected events suppose to happen and lost more money. Yep, the &quot;supposed to be the fun most part&quot; so called &quot;get lost&quot; is not fun at all. Fun parts are only like 40-60%.
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weedpeg超过 3 年前
Bad B2C idea because Most people travel occasionally and at that point they could just do it on email&#x2F;whatsapp groups.<p>Fair enough.<p>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.<p>So not such a bad idea after all.
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neither_color超过 3 年前
<i>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&#x27;re lucky. In fact, Americans are notorious for shirking vacation, clocking the lowest rates of vacation on the planet. Twice a year just doesn&#x27;t cut it.</i><p>This is something I&#x27;ve thought about before. European friends I&#x27;ve met put a lot more thought into destination &quot;discovery&quot; than Americans do. From my own observation, Americans just want to go to places they&#x27;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 (&quot;my friend&#x27;s wedding in Vegas&quot;). In those cases most of the planning is already decided for you, and you only think of where you&#x27;ll stay and what you&#x27;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.<p>Before Covid though I did start to see more aspirational trip planning come up in casual conversations based on places they&#x27;d seen on social media. For example in the years before covid Bali was really well known among Europeans, but wasnt on many Americans&#x27; radar until they started seeing instagrammars photographing beautiful locations. Most talks were of the &quot;would be nice&quot; 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&#x27;s a way for a social media savvy would-be trip planning startup to target people who follow and interact with travel &quot;influencers&quot; with messaging like &quot;here&#x27;s how you can make it to X, on $50&#x2F;daily spend, within a time constraint of 2-3 weeks&quot; I personally was inspired by a guest blog post on Tim Ferriss site many years ago.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tim.blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;cheap-travel-in-paris-new-york-hong-kong&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tim.blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;cheap-travel-in-paris-new-york-h...</a><p>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.
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MarkLowenstein超过 3 年前
This is a great quote!<p><i>I only have a finite number of slots in my brain. If I don&#x27;t remember it, I won&#x27;t use it.</i><p>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&#x27;t sympathetic to us regular people that do not. An example is the common question &quot;Why didn&#x27;t you use [X framework] to do this?&quot; as if the possibility of answering &quot;because I didn&#x27;t know [X framework] existed&quot; would be absurd.
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john_minsk超过 3 年前
Omg. What a crazy article.<p>20% daily retention? Daily usage?<p>If I have an app on my phone that I open once a quarter and it delivers me a ton of value =&gt; I will happily pay for it monthly.<p>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.<p>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…
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rnoorda超过 3 年前
I agree that travel planning is a common (and often bad) startup idea, but I disagree with the reasoning.<p>Part of the enjoyment of many trips, for me, is the planning. I get to learn about the city, see which places&#x2F;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&#x27;re there, or asking what they liked last time they visited, so I don&#x27;t feel a huge pain point here. There are certain aspects of travel I don&#x27;t like planning, such as transportation, but that seems to be where travel startups have been most successful (booking flights, etc.)<p>Similarly, travel apps don&#x27;t know what I like. A museum about a certain artist that I&#x27;m interested in? Great! A concert for a musical genre I don&#x27;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.<p>Finally, I prefer my trips to be flexible. I rarely plan what restaurant I&#x27;m eating at; I&#x27;ll walk around and see what looks good when I&#x27;m there. And if I see something near where I&#x27;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.<p>Perhaps there is something great that just hasn&#x27;t been created yet, or maybe my travel needs are sufficiently unique that I&#x27;m just not the target market, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath.
keeptrying超过 3 年前
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.<p>Painful.<p>Travel planning seems to be common wrong idea and the other is dating websites.
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dr_dshiv超过 3 年前
Ok, but why the @#% doesn&#x27;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.
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OJFord超过 3 年前
I would have thought it&#x27;s to-do&#x2F;kanban or note-taking apps (but with some One Weird Reason they&#x27;re different and about to take the world by storm). Which interestingly enough is not at all like the reasoning here - they&#x27;re pretty sticky, or at least until you move on to try the next one - there&#x27;s just so many of them you&#x27;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&#x27;s both to-do&#x2F;kanban <i>and</i> note-taking, and also database&#x2F;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, ...)
Misdicorl超过 3 年前
The travel app I want is &quot;on the way&quot;. It shows you cool things to do when in transit from point a to point b that&#x27;s only an X minute detour. Or decent food&#x2F;coffee. Or...<p>It&#x27;s frustratingly hard to search google maps&#x2F;etc with a query like this.
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dang超过 3 年前
One past discussion:<p><i>Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658</a> - Oct 2014 (180 comments)
smnrchrds超过 3 年前
It needs a 2012 tag. I was excited to see what Yahoo trip planner does, only to find out it was discontinued long ago.
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ebiester超过 3 年前
This was my first startup idea. I started digging into it in 2010 with the idea of making it more sticky by &quot;step 1: plan your travel around the attractions you want to see. Step 2: We&#x27;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&#x27;ll make a website for you that your friends will want to track, and you&#x27;ll come back to with warm memories.&quot; 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&#x27;t in a place to court investment, and realistically speaking, it wasn&#x27;t worth investing in once I started doing the cost &#x2F; revenue business model.<p>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&#x27;s a giant travel influencer segment now and cross-promotion is where it would be.
dakial1超过 3 年前
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 &quot;estimated visiting time&quot;, cost, etc... But I came to the same conclusion as Garry, this wouldn&#x27;t be something that would appeal to many people.<p>Here is the link for the spreadsheet for the curious (you&#x27;ll need a Google Maps Api key): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1TQE_kMb0K8Xf_eYBIoEFmD4&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;16T9kLpbqciKCLNWOoOV1...</a>
browningstreet超过 3 年前
I often wish there was better trip&#x2F;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.<p>I do miss old school Foursquare, only somewhat apropos.
xtqctz超过 3 年前
I wonder how a more competent form of Siri&#x2F;Alexa&#x2F;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.<p>&quot;Hey Siri, book me a flight to Vancouver for next January when prices are below $400&quot;<p>&quot;Hey Siri, show me my travel itinerary&quot;
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Graffur超过 3 年前
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 &#x27;spending enough quality time with friends and family&#x27; or how that relates to travel.<p>Also, some things I do less than travel:<p>* Amazon prime day sales (once a year)<p>* Christmas (once a year)<p>* Dentist (2&#x2F;3 times a year)<p>* Get my car serviced<p>* Get my bike serviced
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basch超过 3 年前
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.<p>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.<p>There&#x27;s not enough auto scheduling where you say &quot;we want two days of rest, one day of museums, and to eat out 4 time&quot; where it fills in the rest.<p>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.<p>Maybe everyone saying it cant work just cant see how great it could be. If it was Apple level &quot;it just works&quot; a group of friends might click &quot;plan a trip&quot; 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&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>A way for it to be &quot;used every day&quot; is for it to aggregate Yelp and Google Reviews, and local events and let you plan more than just out of town travel. &quot;What are we doing before the concert on Saturday, do our babysitters have the schedule?&quot; Another way to make it &quot;used every day&quot; 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 &quot;we should go to Florida.&quot; &quot;I want to go to Nashville.&quot; &quot;How about Gulfport.&quot; &quot;As long as it has casinos.&quot; 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.
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monsieurpng超过 3 年前
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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unatravel.ai&#x2F;una-travel-planner&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unatravel.ai&#x2F;una-travel-planner&#x2F;</a>
sfusato超过 3 年前
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 &amp; 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&#x27;t schedule a museum visit on off hours etc.<p>Without curators, which are locally incentivized experts, the traveler would have to <i>work</i> on getting and keeping everything organized. Some actually do like this research part, but most don&#x27;t.<p>How do you bridge the gap between curators and travelers? For the 1st group, it&#x27;s their work time, for the 2nd group it&#x27;s supposed to be their vacation time. Kinda like a concierge service in some aspects.
wly_cdgr超过 3 年前
The good version of this wouldn&#x27;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
fauria超过 3 年前
The article refers to leisure travel. There are multiple successful enterprise travel startups, such as TravelPerk:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TravelPerk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TravelPerk</a>
throwdbaaway超过 3 年前
Similarly, if the best use case of your software is to help with trip planning, it is not going to end well either:<p>&gt; 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datamation.com&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;the-mystery-of-kde-activities&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datamation.com&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;the-mystery-of-kde-ac...</a>
modeless超过 3 年前
I thought it was task tracking software.
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trhoad超过 3 年前
Not too sure about this take. By this logic, the car industry would be bankrupt - people don&#x27;t buy cars that often. Isn&#x27;t the real issue that the spend vs. frequency is off? If I spend (on average) $1 a day on an app, that&#x27;s a pretty good business. If I spend $10,000 every 10 year, that&#x27;s also a good business. However, if I spend $1 every year, that&#x27;s likely a bad business. It&#x27;s not about how often, but how often as a function, with how much as the parameter.
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thehappypm超过 3 年前
The best travel planning app, by far, is Gmail.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in the travel industry and we&#x27;d work on tools for travel planning, and we&#x27;d get excited that you could put your itinerary together with just a few clicks. You know what&#x27;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&#x27;s all in one place. Amazing stuff.
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teliskr超过 3 年前
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!
timwis超过 3 年前
I was thinking the same thing recently for looking for a flat with a partner&#x2F;roommate. A collaborative triage&#x2F;kanban style system for reviewing&#x2F;contacting&#x2F;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.
koboll超过 3 年前
Tell that to Pieter Levels, who&#x27;s made a fortune off travel planning software as a one-man shop.
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stemuk超过 3 年前
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&#x2F;todo list.
ChrisArchitect超过 3 年前
anything new on this since 2012 you think?<p>Here&#x27;s a bunch of previous discussion from 7 years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658</a>
jmartens超过 3 年前
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.
sentinel超过 3 年前
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.
cubano超过 3 年前
Maybe the simple answer here is that people don&#x27;t want to use the same tools they use at work all year for planning what is supposed to be a escape from work?<p>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 &quot;going to the museum&quot; instead of &quot;meeting with sales&quot; embedded into some app....bleh!<p>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.
theonlybutlet超过 3 年前
That&#x27;s interesting!<p>Google&#x27;s is very good, myself and my friends use it. Perhaps solely due to its tight integration with your Gmail and search.
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cortesoft超过 3 年前
There seem to be a number of successful companies in the travel space... are they not actually?
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firemelt超过 3 年前
damn I also have this bad idea before lol
it超过 3 年前
youli.io is doing it, steadily gaining traction. Disclaimer: I built their mobile app.
OneEyedRobot超过 3 年前
I always thought it was grocery delivery or mail-order pet supplies.<p>There are honest-to-charlie geniuses out there. I think that the founder of Pixelon needs a giant trophy.
kogir超过 3 年前
Instagram and Trello seem to be doing ok.