I had been building http://wishcan.com, a drag-and-drop travel planner, and will hand it off to someone willing to continue the work. Trip planning is difficult to get right, and notoriously hard to find a business model for. I think it's simply because no one has gotten the UI/UX perfect. I am now working on an IoT platform called http://smartxlab.com
WishCan looks pretty awesome. Great job! I built something very similar: http://www.travelizer.io/ - Although it's not as further along as WishCan. Interesting to see so many people attempting to solve the travel planning riddle but it's tough to get it right.
Cannot agree more with wishcan. I sketched up a few different ideas for something like this, but never pushed on because I thought integrating with hotels, airlines, etc. Would painful. Also figured I'd need to automatically parse email confirmations, which would be a PITA.
What is it written in and how much work is left to do?
I often wondered if automating the pain point you mention above (integrating with hotels, airlines etc.) and providing a singular, specialized API for that would be an amazing business opportunity. Seems like one of the existing travel companies could do it, or a travel agency.
Strikes me that you could turn this around somewhat...
When people are publishing what they want, that looks to be a good starting point for travel/lodging companies to come in and make offers to these folks.
"You're looking to stay in Bucharest on Sept 18 and 19? Our hotel can offer you XZY for $ABC on those nights."
Sort of like lendingtree-model for travel. Not quite sure why that's not taken off yet, other than, perhaps, larger company IT systems?
This could possibly work well for smaller regions - contact a local chamber of commerce and have them have all the local businesses make offers to people looking to stay in areas on specific days.
Basically... define a format and let them integrate with you if they want access to the market you've defined, not the other way around.
And just to add on to my previous comment (can't edit it), I have over a 1,000 email subscribers from my website. Haven't actually done anything with those emails yet, but I think marketing to them can be accelerated if I get my site to be more user-friendly and feature rich. Would definitely be interested to talk to you about it
Where can I contact you? I run a website in the vacation space that ranks well on Google for over 100 keywords. I was planning to expand my website and build a drag n drop feature like the one you did. Let me know if I can reach out to you via email, or you can send me one at thepredestrian@gmail.com
Definitely like the user interface here. I normally do this kind of planning in Excel or Sheets, but it's hard to "visualize" the trip in tables. The timeline is great.
hey it looks polished! my wife and i are planning for a trip to Taipei mid-Sep, so i'm wondering if your app is usable (at least until end of this month).
I just used Sygic Travel (https://travel.sygic.com) to plan a very last-minute road trip in Iceland. I knew nothing about Iceland to begin with. I spent less than 8 hours planning the whole trip, and ~ 5 of them were in Sygic. It was great! Post-trip, I can attest that using it helped me make the most of my time in Iceland. I was well-informed during the trip (at least on par with most other travellers I met), and ended-up seeing most of the popular spots.
I think Sygic did a great job with identifying the key user stories:
1. Ability to see a list of interesting places to generate ideas (they've partnered with Fodors, the content is comprehensive, at least for Iceland)
2. Ability to set my travel dates and schedule places that I want to visit on specific days
3. Ability to see places on a map so that I can schedule more efficiently. (I was able to schedule places in different regions on different dates, and thereby minimise driving times)
4. Ability to view and order daily itineraries (list + map) and ability to estimate travel time for a given itinerary. (This helped me avoid being over ambitious and gave me plenty of room to breathe during the trip)
5. Ability to see/book hotels on a map that have availability on my dates. I ended up making all my hotel reservations (4 nights) through their Booking.com integration. Never have I been happier to click on an affiliate link! The ability to visually plan your days and nights within the same interface really helps. Without this, I would have done what most last-minute travellers in Iceland do – book a hotel in Reykjavik (capital) for the entire stay and take day trips in/out. This would have severely limited my coverage of Iceland and cost more.
6. Ability to take my itinerary with me. They have a easy to use (free) mobile app with premium features e.g. offline maps. Paid for the premium features but didn't end up using them as internet worked great in Iceland!
Overall, the interface was really well done, albeit with a 3-4 hour learning curve. I found myself needlessly bouncing back and forth between ideation and scheduling.
I jotted down a few ideas while I was using it:
- Break down planning into several stages: Ideation, Scheduling, Reservations. This would allow the interface to be more streamlined and reduce cognitive complexity of planning
- Provide the ability to algorithmically cluster places into days and find shortest path for overall trip
Anyway, wish can looks great! I'd love to contribute. I'm a pretty good programmer (iOS/Web), professionally a senior product manager, and also have decent design skills. Let me know if I can help. I haven't coded for the web in a while so would prefer to team up with someone with up-to-date front-end skills.
As many have pointed out, the cost of developing a game has escalated to a level where few companies can afford it. I wonder if the development industry is ripe to move from vertical integration to further specialization.
For example, we could have a standardized 3D environment format, where some companies specialize in creating those. Other companies could specialize in creating characters, others physics engines, story development, or direction.
An added benefit of this is a potential for game worlds to connect to each other (this has always been a dream of mine).
I know the industry is already specialized into development studios and publishers. I wonder if further specialization could spread out the risk, and increase the competitiveness of each party, even more.
This is awesome! I noticed that the "Search for the Lowest Air Fares" page seems different in design from the other pages. Are the forms embedded from another site? Which site did you use?
But there are ways to outsource the chores, right? What would be some of the chores that you could potentially outsource? I'd say this would count as a need.
