Apply HN: PlanitWide – A network marketplace for planning travel

2 points by ASquare 10 years ago | 3 comments

Our travel planning platform provides a purpose-built organizer for “careful planners” to research and plan their trip. This organizer comes pre-populated with information to research every aspect of a trip. Users can also gain assistance from our community of pro and semi-pro specialists who have targeted expertise and local relationships.

We think that an effective travel market-network has to cater to four key aspects as part of an integrated workflow: 1. Dreaming: The inspiration/desire 2. Planning: The research 3. Buying: Booking and itinerary creation 4. Consuming: Everything done on the trip and then shared

For this to happen, certain conditions needed to exist. Over several decades, one or more of these conditions has been made possible (ie., the internet and smartphones) with some materializing only recently (ie., collaborative economy, niche communities)

Now that these conditions finally exist, a travel market-network can become a reality. What’s needed is a community-driven platform that bridges the information sources to the consumer by offering a systematic research and planning method. This is what will bring the Dream-Plan-Buy-Consume aspects of travel together to be catered to effectively by this market-network.

Status: We used a prototype to validate the “single player” utility of the product before we moved on to the network effect pieces. We are currently revamping the user experience based on feedback.

buss 10 years ago |

My biggest problem when traveling is choosing a hotel near the things that I'm interested in. For me that's food, for others it's parks and museums, and others it's shopping. Would your service help me?

Another issue I have is that I don't have any intuitions about the layout of the city I'm visiting, so I can't easily plan several things in a row. Would your platform help with this?

How will you get users?

ASquare 10 years ago | |

Yes it will. The way the organizer is laid out is by trip decision. So initial research, orientation etc, for eg, falls into a "Basics" bucket that provides you the best information to get a sense of the place.

The initial iteration isn't geared towards giving you the answer (need a lot of data to make this happen) vs presenting you with the best & most relevant resources to help you arrive at the answer that best answers your questions

So in terms of finding hotels, as in your example, the tool wouldn't currently do it, but would give you the best resources to help you figure that out as quickly as possible.

Re: users. This is clearly one of the biggest challenges with travel startups given the 1-3 times a year use for most.

We've been testing a community passionate about travel and we're extremely encouraged by the results from the last couple of months in bringing people back almost daily (either to submit content, engage with it or just consume). Bottom line they're coming back for a reason other than to plan travel. But by coming back, we're staying top of mind as the place they discovered these great travel resources so that when they're ready to plan a trip we're likely going to be the place they do it. We're also working on something that ties this community more tightly into the platform down the line so the entire journey from initial discovery through planning is seamless.

We haven't pulled any of the levers that allow for content sharing content or referral mechanisms etc as yet that will serve to bring others to this community, which will serve as the top of the funnel, on an ongoing basis.

bestattack 10 years ago |

You're using a lot of high-level descriptions and marketing speak that makes me have trouble understanding what your app actually does. Usually it's best to start with describing the one most useful thing that your app will do, to start.