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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Please can someone answer the following question, in all seriousness:

What problem is the travel planning software startup solving?

Never have I planned a holiday and thought "I need an app for this." Maybe a better flight booking system, or a better guidebook, but never a website or app. In fact, I find planning holidays enjoyable and fairly straightforward.

I know of no-one who has difficulty planning their holiday, beyond the flight problem. And to make this work, you're going to need a lot of people with the same problem, whatever that problem is.

Anyone?

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I have this problem every year. Last year I went on a 6 week vacation. I wanted to go to an African safari, but where? What should I see? What route is best? Turns out safaris are super-expensive and I can only afford 2 weeks. What should I do for the rest of the time? My flight had a stop-over in Turkey, so I might as well spend a few weeks there. Should I also go to Greece, Croatia, or southern Italy? It was October so I only want to go where the weather is still warm. I wanted to stay in interesting B&Bs, go hiking in Crete, see gorillas in Uganda, etc.

I ended up going through a human travel agent who planned a wonderful trip at a steep discount to the luxury safari pre-planned trips because she understood what we wanted to pay for (experiences) and what we didn't care about (fancy hotels).

Thanks for the interesting example.

Couple of questions:

Not many people go on six week vacations, right? If you were planning a two week holiday, would you still be faced with so many decisions and complexity? If not, the market you represent would be limited to longer holidays, which may be a very small market.

Second, could an app provide you with a better service than your travel agent? i.e. is this a "problem", or is a "solved problem" because a satisfactory solution exists already?

I usually take 2 to 3 week vacations, but I try to do interesting things. Ride horses around mongolia. Hike volcanos in Indonesia. Bike and eat across France. Planning is a huge pain because we have to learn everything before we can make the right choices. A travel agent already knows the domain. I do think there could be tools to help agents arrange trips more quickly given our unique constraints. Sadly, there is no app for that. Regardless, the market is likely a small niche.

I always have this problem. I typically book flights, hostels and travel in between seperately. I typically only stay in a place for 2 days so I need a new hostel and mode of transport for each place + a list of places to visit when I get there (with opening times/prices etc.). I usually put all of this into google doc, though simple things like pushing everything back a day are hard.

To me, the most in need of this are gap year travellers i.e. people travelling for a month or more around the world.

Thanks.

Are you satisfied with your current solution, or is there an outstanding problem to be solved?

I agree about gap year travellers. How big is that market? Also, is the problem not already solved by STA Travel and similar companies?

2.5m from the UK alone according to this: http://www.lattitude.org.uk/2012/04/the-number-of-gap-year-s... (sounds too high), this says 200k from UK http://www.gapadvice.org/index.php/considering-a-gap-year/fa... My guess is the worldwide figure is in the millions.

I want a rough plan with bus/train times, hostels shortlisted and other notes about how to make it all work together, then I'll probably change the plan if I stay in a place longer or shorter than expected. I'd like to have record of how much I've spend and will spend too. A lot of people in Europe are interailing, which mean they mostly just book trains and hostels - which seems like a simple use case compared to elsewhere.

Existing solutions in general are basically:

  - plan everything before hand e.g. get a bunch of receipts from STA travel before you go.
  - book a tour (e.g. g adventures), then everything is organised for you

I generally like to plan based on input from a variety of sources (guide books, magazine articles, travel sites, friends who recently took the same trip, etc.) Gathering all that information is great but I've sometimes wished for an efficient way to access and sort those recommendations when I need them most - while I'm out walking around - rather then in my hotel room.

Yeah, I don't get it either. I'm reading the comments here trying to even understand what a "travel planning site" would look like. I SORT of get it, but everyone seems to have totally different ideas of what this product would be.

I don't care, really. I just got back from 5 countries in Europe in 4 weeks. I just... went. I mean, we booked a couple places to stay ahead of time, and I planned my car rentals and bought tickets, but none of that was remotely difficult.

I never once thought "gee, I wish I could... uh.. go to a site.. and ..click things".

I have to agree. Just spent 6 weeks in China. Just booked the flight there and back in advance. No hotels, not much research, not flights or trains within the country. Very liberating. The only difficult part was deciding on a general route, which took some research.

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