NB: This is a guest article by Tony Carne, general manager at Urban Adventures.
I’m finally getting a chance to get away for a while after a big year at work.
As a lover of travel technology and an avid reader of Tnooz and its TLabs Showcases in particular I was really looking forward to breaking out some of the great startups and their toys for travel planning.
After all – this was the year that people built stuff that would make those involved in the trip planning industry crap its pants! [Ed: perhaps not]
The selected destination is the most visited on the planet – France. We are going for a month and didn’t really have an idea of exactly what we will do. We thought we’d leave that up to the world of travel planning tech to take care of for us.
We’ve got our flights and the car is rented, so sorry to people who are solving those problems – we’ve got that sorted.
Our other limitation was that I have a PC and my wife only has an iPad but we obviously wanted to use all the tricks and tips to pull a trip together collaboratively. We both have smartphones but are not likely to use them for long range, in depth trip planning.
Issues
So off we went – first stop – well we aren’t going to Paris as we’ve been there plenty of times before and if we do, it will just be for a day to catch up with Tim from Paris Urban Adventures who can give us all the info we need on anything else we need to do.
Suddenly 90% of the solutions to travel planning seem to have become redundant as they are only covering the capital.
We attempted the social route. There are loads of social travel planning apps around so I gave a few of those a go. I signed up using FB connect with pretty much everything, let the app post to my account and shot out the word I needed help planning a trip to France.
The result... crickets.
I guess it worth mentioning that I’m a 40 year old guy with only a passing interest in what is happening on Facebook outside of our own page. I pop up a few odd photos of my daughter for far off friends and relatives to see and maybe go in to my personal account once every two weeks for a quick flick through.
Many of my friends don’t have accounts or haven’t looked at their accounts for six months or more. I may as well have just shouted out my front door as the response would have been the same.
I won’t call out the many different solutions we tried here as that is not the purpose of the article and potentially I’m not the target audience of those solutions. The purpose is to show that the opportunity and need still exists for those that can find the solution.
Why is there a problem?
Perhaps my circumstances are too extreme (mixed technology, social group not really involved in social media) or my requirements too vague (I just want to go to France, what sort of idiot doesn’t know any more than that about the trip they want to do) but they just are what they are and very little we used, made the planning experience easier.
To specifically nail down the common flaw I found with the majority of sites, solutions and apps for my situation as a first phase inspirational searcher, was that almost none even allowed search on "France".
The search process would only allow you to pass if you chose something from a sub menu or predictive search list. I’d click a couple of options thinking there might be some gems behind those place names but that was rarely if ever the case. Mainly it was lists of hotels or feeds from Yelp or Foursquare.
One in particular allowed France and I thought they had cracked it until it landed me in Tuscany for the France search. Those sites may have been handy when I’d laid out my basic route and had a handful of specific village names but after a frustrating first encounter – I was unlikely to return.
And I wanted our trip plan to be in a single place.
(Part) Solutions?
I’m happy to mention the couple that came closest. Triposo did have a good depth on destinations in France. Some of it (the cities) was seemingly curated but a lot of it had nothing beyond the Wikitravel scrape. At least it was all in one place and easy to access.
It covers off a good portion of the world and it gave me a few town names I knew nothing about to go and do some more research on.
Mygola was the other one that gave me a patchwork itinerary to start from and links to where they were getting their information from – one of which was Les Plus Beaux Villages de France and Voila!
Here was the Aladdin’s Cave I was looking for to give me some rough jumping off points for a month in France of scenic villages and long lunches. Unfortunately for Mygola there was then no need to go back and pay to get more information.
What I expected to find from a planning perspective, I found in the Utrip’s app. If I was going to be in Paris I love the way Utrip just asked for a few different preferences and then within the blink of an eye laid out a full itinerary for whatever length of stay you wanted with route map and all.
I don’t know if the output of the actual suggestions is good but the planning style is great. If they have really good curating filter it will be a winner.
If Utrip can get enough information for more expansive journeys and allowed you to drop some of their recommendations and pin a few preferences of your own (that they could add to their own graph as they know my basic personality traits), it could be a perfect starting point for inspirational travel planning.
If it worked offline, on an iPad and had an alarm when I got within 20 kilometres of something I’d picked – I’d be in heaven.
Trazzler has some interesting content that it can push based on location as we go around for a bit of spontaneous visiting of places that we hadn’t found in other research methods and I look forward to seeing where that will take us along the way.
The events function in the app seems only to work on location so fingers crossed for the odd pie baking festival or medieval battle recreation to spring up en route.
It left me kind of stunned that there is nothing out there like what Adioso is doing in flight search that you can just type "a month in France" and be given a few different options that you can mix and match with a couple of keep or drop clicks or a preference algorithm to get the tour you want.
If you got me to click on whether I liked or disliked a few different hotel rooms, chateaux and farm houses with some pricing on them, you could give me some places to stay recommendations that I would most likely book there and then (we booked 11 places in the end, so that is commission times 11 for someone if they had the solution).
Wider dilemma
We are the fourth of our friends to undertake this type of trip in the past couple of years with only the length and some of the specific interests differing. If we add our parents and their friends to the list we are well into double figures over the past 5 years alone.
In the end we had a few of those people over for a BBQ and got out the AA atlas, which was by far the most fun part of the planning process.
We took those handful of the suggestions, plotted them on AA map and went to Airbnb and Tripping (as the best aggregator of all other accommodation rentals except Airbnb) to choose some great unique accommodation.
We’ve got a great trip now mostly organised but it didn’t happen online nor in a single place which is what I’d hoped for in a planning tool.
Presumably, now someone will tell me I just should have used Brand X – it will, or course, it will do exactly what I wanted and I’ll slap myself on the forehead and give that a try the next time a big trip rolls around.
If not, it’s still wide open for someone to consider what the actual planning process can entail. I see all the components out there separately – someone just needs to pull them together in one place across all the technology.
NB: This is a guest article by Tony Carne, general manager at Urban Adventures.
NB2:Angry planning travel image via Shutterstock.