Proximity and intent are two key pieces of the travel puzzle — each offers a path to success in travel as the monetization path is clearer with value to both the supplier and end-user.
As the teams coalesced at THack Dublin, proximity was a focus for many as they searched for new ways to deliver proximity-aware travel information and bookings.
The developers came together to form teams to hack travel concepts using the Hotelbeds and Skyscanner APIs, addressing three proposed challenges: inspiration/discovery, accommodation finder and route planner. At stake was Euro 7,000 and a week of mentoring in Bordeaux by the 33entrepreneurs crew.
Inspiration and discovery: Snap, Holiday Radar and Eventspire
Yes, this is a perennial favorite among newcomers to travel yet there's still plenty of ground to cover as far as linking inspiration to booking.
Snap is a mobile app that shows recommendations of short-term travel — or as the team pitches it, an "opinionated approach to travel." The app only works on mobile...and on Tuesdays. It's tailored specifically for booking weekend trips for two people, so that friends and couples might be able to plan quick escapes easily. This hook was instantly memorable and such a targeted use case could find rapid uptake within that specific demographic.
The time limitation is meant to encourage people to only use it for close-in travel at the weekend. The app will deliver five options for the weekend, including hotel and flights. One trick is the "true getaway cost" which includes an integration that tells the user how much they would make for renting out their house. People's choice winner! Skyscanner API winner!
Holiday Radar is a recommendation engine for travel based on social media likes and activity hashtags. The service simplifies the process of determining what destination to pick by analyzing publicly shared information on social media.
Think "personalized travel recommendations based on your interests" by using a natural language processing approach with social media feeds to create the list of recommended places.
Eventspire is a platform that helps travelers go to events they love. The idea is to connect travelers who have passions around sports and music to affordable trips to those kind of events worldwide. Using Eventful, Hotelbeds and Skyscanner, the team pulls in concert information with hotel and flight data to surface clear package pricing for a trip.
"Reducing barriers to pursue passions" was how the team marketed the service during their final pitch, emphasizing the end-to-end nature of its festival/event travel platform. This hack has clear commercial potential and it was Judge's choice large team winner!
Accommodation finder: Simple Hotel Finder, Walking Distance and Sleipnir
With this challenge to build a recommendation engine for personalized accommodations, Simple Hotel Finder took a mobile-first approach to finding a hotel using Tinder as the model for its "visual fingertip filtering."
The mobile web app will show photos from hotels alongside StreetView images so that it can learn what the user prefers. The reasoning behind StreetView is that it provides an accurate, neutral and non-scrubbed view of the hotel's neighborhood to address safety concerns. The interface makes it simple to swipe through potential hotel rooms. Judge's choice small team winner!
The solo developer behind Walking Distance wanted to create an accommodation finder that would put the traveler closer to what they want to do. The thought process behind the app was to rethink how we book holidays — it asks for a city and a date but it also asks what you want to do while you're there.
The app will then figure out where you need to be to do those things and calculates where they are in comparison to nearby hotels. Thus it delivers hotels within walking distance — hence the name. The tool also offers the ability for users who don't know what they want to do to select the types of activities that they would want to do.
Sleipnir also took the angle of providing contextual awareness for hotel selection. The two-person team laid out hotels according to a specific location — so you could find a hotel near a conference or other point-of-interest.
After entering the anchor address, the map interface populates with nearby hotels. Different color icons designate four price categories from low to high so users can find a hotel at the right price and location. The team pointed out that most search interfaces only provide the distance from the city center, which can be a difficult measure for someone either unfamiliar with a city or looking for hotels in a specific place.
Route planner: Perfect Plan, TripCost Calculator and Dreamap
This challenge is about creating applications for transportation planning with various user inputs. It's a difficult one, as there are plenty of hurdles when effectively routing a user from A to B.
Dreamap presents users with pictures that inspire a yes/no decision on travel choices so they can "swipe the world." The interface allows users to swipe through holiday destinations and aggregate flights and accommodation for each.
The four-person team wanted to create an engaging experience that would make it easier to learn about places to go from information that's already available via social. Curated photos come from Foursquare and the website asks "Does this place look nice?"
The algorithm begins to learn what the user likes and doesn't in order to personalize an offer; the inspiration from the photos is translated into suggested itineraries, priced with hotel and flight. Hotelbeds API winner!
The Perfect Plan team saw a huge problem when it comes to planning a vacation during a limited timeframe — say when you only have five vacation days available to a trip. The features include an open text-based search, the ability to create and share plans, Facebook integration and a tip plan generator.
The team used natural language processing and user inputs to start creating a list of interesting destinations for users, with the angle that "everything you want, simply type it." This is an interesting use of NLP that is only going to continue to be an essential piece of travel search technology, especially as mobile requires more rapidly accurate searches.
Tripcost Calculator takes data from Skyscanner's flight cache, hotel information from Hotelbeds and meal information from Yelp. By bringing together that data, the mobile app makes it easy to calculate how much a trip would cost. The interface offers sliders for selections such as how many days, where the user is staying, if they will rent a car and if they go out at night. As each slider is altered, a total estimated cost calculation is created for that specific trip.
Join us for the next THack overlooking the tarmac @ SFO, June 13 and 14. Register here!
NB: Jameson chimney image courtesy Flickr user Giuseppe Milo.
https://twitter.com/Skyscanner/status/596962815145078784