Plan More Trips, Take More Trips
People who travel to new places need a way to do research for a trip more easily because it can be an overwhelming process that can discourage someone from travelling.
With the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic behind us, we are seeing more and more people (individuals, groups, and families) wanting to travel across the world and experience new things.
Although the desire to travel is there, and studies from the U.S. Travel Association show that 55% of Americans are planning to prioritise leisure travel spending, it doesn’t change how tedious and overwhelming the process of planning a trip is. For many people deciding what to do on a trip takes a lot of work and research. People want to make sure what they decide to do resonates with them the most, but what does it take to get the information you’re looking for? Most travelers use at least 4 different sites/apps (Google, Travel blogs, Youtube, Tiktok, etc) to search for information for what to do on their trip. Then they have to filter through the content to make sure the information they find aligns with the type of experience that they are looking for.
The problem is that everyone is doing their individual research trying to put things together to make an itinerary on their own and hoping that it works out. Both the process of doing the research and the hope that the trip they planned is good, creates additional stress for the traveler.
I conducted a survey to understand the travel planning experience where I received over 60 responses and I followed up with 5 user interviews from this group. Here are the key insights:
The main takeaway is that people absolutely still want to travel to new places and experience new things, but due to all the money and effort it takes to travel, they feel a lot of pressure to make sure they get the best experience out of their trip. This pressure makes potential travelers overwhelmed when trying to do research and the focus is to alleviate the pressure of planning a trip and picking the right things to do.
When thinking about a solution to this problem, the question I had to answer was how do we make the research process for activities to do and finding places to eat on a trip easier? The answer is to 100% plan someone’s trip for them after they give input of what they want. While we can’t provide this specialized service of planning everyone’s trip for them, we can’t create a platform where they can share and use other people’s itineraries of trips that went well.
The solution I am proposing is a community based platform where travelers can connect and share their itineraries, insights, and tips for places that they’ve traveled to before because why should you do the research if someone else has done it already?
You may ask what makes this platform, MoreTrips, different from other sites like TripAdvisor and I have 2 main reasons.
At the end of the day, the goal of MoreTrips is to build a community where some travelers can share their itineraries, insights, and suggestions for specific destinations and other travelers can use the information shared to plan their trip. It’s not just a platform with a list of the top restaurants or top things to do.
If I were to continue building out this product, the first thing I would do is work with a developer and designer to build an MVP. This MVP would allow users to create travel profiles and post information.
After at least 50-100 posts are shared on the platform, below are a few things I would do with the product.
Co.Lab was a great experience as someone not currently in the tech world. Working as a PM it taught two very important things