Myself and 2 friends wanted to help people make smarter decisions on big purchases. This is our story of committing the cardinal sin of startups.. creating a consumer travel product.

The Product: https://www.getcluey.com/en/explorer/

Once described it as a load balancer for tourists.

It's still a work in progress, the data is not perfect, and it's more of a tool than a product at the moment. But we want to share the concept and trade ideas.

Similar tools have existed in the past but not to this level of detail. The ones we came across in our research were generally vague and seemed to always suggest the same places.

We're new to travel. It's going to be a battle, but we're passionate about the problem we are trying to solve. Travel can be indulgent, but there are a lot of important benefits too. Injecting money into small, local economies. Meeting new people, seeing new cultures - breaking out of the bubbles we can fall into day to day.

Cluey's goal is to allow people to quickly search and compare travel destinations. Looking for places for a balmy beach holiday in October within 7 hours flight of you? Hard but doable. Try to overlay that with popularity, cost, rainfall, safety, activities, language? Hope you have a degree in data science.

Some user feedback we've received: - I thought Armenia was dangerous and war torn, it's not? It looks beautiful. - I was going to fly to the Bahamas but its probably because it's so prominent on American media. I couldn't figure out where in the pacific it's warm without tropical drizzle. Actually there's heaps, a lot cheaper, and a shorter flight.

It's not really going to help you already know exactly where you want to go and do there. It's useful if you have limitations or specific needs. Eg a popular one seems to be young families who only want to fly X hours with their children and would like to see what the options are.