Ask HN: What would be your ideal travel website be like?

1 points by vaib 9 years ago | 5 comments

I am in the process of thinking about a good travel website. If I want to go somewhere or have recommendations about a short trip on the weekend I resort to tripadvisor.com but the problem is going through reviews on it. So maybe we can make this better. Maybe we can have a fuss free, clean and clear good travel website. What are your thoughts on it? What would your ideal (or near ideal) website look like or do? What would probably be that feature that would completely blow away users(or us)?

Thanking in anticipation!

herbst 9 years ago |

I too am writing a travel website currently. I dont want to give out my focus tho :)

Your features seem to be dependend on having users. With the amount of etablished travel website, how do you want to overcome the chicken egg problem?

vaib 9 years ago | |

No, I think I would not only depend on users but they will have an option to put in data. I think initially I would have to scrape data, put some seed data myself, etc. But let's assume that the data is in fact there, then this aims to be a short trip/weekend getaway recommendation website. Is that something someone would want to use? Ofcourse, please don't give away your focus. Though I don't think it matters because generally no one wants to build someone else's idea :) So I just want opinions here on what a good travel site should do. I was initially thinking that this website I propose could get popular but now I am thinking - hey, anyone can google 'places around me for weekend getaways' and get a lot of links, etc.

herbst 9 years ago | | |

Yeah i think that is the problem. If you do not do something unique people will go with major platforms that they already know.

Its hard to tell if there is still a need as i havent launched mine yet ether. All i know is that i am rather pessimistic for its success because of all the other resources out there.

vaib 9 years ago |

Specifically, do you think this would work? https://github.com/vaibkv/weekend-whats-up-app

There's nothing in there yet, just a readme but do you think if I make it users will come?