I assume you're not a developer?
I'm not asking for restaurant menus; the restaurants ARE categorized in Google Maps already.
I know exactly what data is available, and how I'd code it. I just don't have the time.
My first reaction was "you'd have to explain some things are easy cause there's libraries/tech that does that". I guess the real explanation is " countless hours and dollars spent by others who came before us make this easy...".
Would probably take me 3-4 solid days to get to MVP, maybe even the full first week, given that I'd be slowed down by the learning curve. But I'm also very busy (see: "I'm an awesome developer").
It's also about five hours of work to just do it the boring way by hand. An 8-12 year amortization of a project that people have argued eloquently is a total waste of time as a start-up? Why wouldn't I work on something I cared more about, instead?
So what did you end up doing for your roadtrip? Did you find a tool or did you just do it on your own? I'd be curious to see what you ended up using.
Thanks
It's not going to help you plan but if you'd like to blog about your road trip when you're on the road, take a look at my attempt to build a "micro blogging" website. Each day, you're only allowed to write 250 characters and attach a single photo:
It's free to use, feedback welcome. I wrote the site for my little road trip because I was so unhappy with everything else out there. The idea being that a character and photo limit forced you to be concise (much appreciated by friends and family), making it easier to maintain and look back on. Here's our trip (we were lucky enough to get some air time on the BBC world news):
just signed up, i'll give it a shot for my upcoming trip, few points from the sign up process:
- Dates seem to be American Format (this is fine but at least indicate it in the placeholder text) - I have no idea what a marker is, perhaps explain it or even let people know it can be blank!
I'm going to sign up and give it a try. Thanks!
How often do you take road trips like this one? More than once a year? Monthly? Weekly? If you can convince me that there is a large addressable market full of people who take weekly or monthly road trips, I'll grant you that someone needs to spend some cycles making a better road trip app.
Now, this isn't to say that it's not a real problem. Clearly it is. Case in point: you're taking a road trip, and the apps you've looked through suck. You'd love something better. As would others. Fair. So perhaps the ideal solution here is for someone to make a better road trip planning app on the side, as a hobby. It's probably not a big enough market to warrant a startup. The use case is too specific and too infrequent to build a viable, fast-growing business model around.
AAA apparently has a road trip planner that's only available to members. That's one business model. :)
TripAdvisor could offer something to help promote their site. As I said above, a strong developer could crank out something better than most existing alternatives with a small time commitment.
A hobby app might be the right speed. Some suggestions I got above might end up being "good enough", though.
I'm co-founder at https://www.wanderant.com. We started off with similar frustrations on planning trips. All the information you could ever want is online - and for free - so we should better off than where we were when you'd just buy a Lonely Planet book. But that's not the case, I think it's actually gotten harder - partly because there's so much info, and so many options.
We're a year+ into it, and have been iterating multiple times on an MVP. It's a big problem to solve, so 'minimal' is a bit high - plus it's a different minimal for every traveler you meet (e.g. comment here on "an option for children" which is absolutely critical for some).
Here are some things we've learned along the way:
* Top 3 things people need / want that haven't been solved:
- Local expertise - esp when traveling abroad - what is the local yelp / gothamist / etc? - Help with logistics - mostly around how to get from A to B - Rome2Rio is a great help in that regard, still takes a lot of work for planning an entire trip though - A way to manage a plan in one place - instead of email /bookmarks / excel
* Some of the challenges we've encountered:
a- Making a product that's easy to use - If you're only solving one step (e.g., online booking), it's easier to create a workflow that makes sense. I love examples like how hipmunk have simplified UX for booking flights. We are building towards a workflow that lets you keep your entire plan in one place - ideas, map, notes, reservations,... and finding a UX to make that easy is a lot of work.
b- Getting to a product that really adds value to planning- We want a tool that simplifies the process of planning. However, we clearly can't start with a product that does everything you need for a trip. Even in the near future, our product will continue to be an incomplete solution. So paradoxically, by being an additive tool in the process, we've successfully worked against making it simpler :) We have to make up for that by really adding a lot of value and saving time fr the user- and getting to that point is also a lot of work
c- Marketing is hard - others have mentioned the challenge of facing giants in the space- I'd like to offer another piece- which is reaching trip planners at the right time. Only a small % of people we reach are in the process of planning a trip. Then if they are, we most likely don't yet offer very rich content for where they're going - because currently our higher-quality content is still nascent. So that makes finding the right users hard. Any help here is appreciated btw - if you know someone who could use this send them along :)
* Why we're continuing - Times like this, when we see someone get passionate about how much they wish this existed or how they can't believe it hasn't been done before. We feel the same :)
- While it's a hard problem to solve, and there's a lot of challenges we already know of and more we don't yet - it is a really interesting problem to think about and try to crack.
- More than all, we love to travel to new places and explore the world. If we can share that experience and make it easier for a few others, we'd be ever so pleased.
I just discovered Rome2Rio on this thread and it seems useful for things like whether I can take a train from A to B or whether flying makes more sense.
I use Tripit for much of my organization but it obviously only captures some things and it's format for displaying a whole trip is moderately awful.
I don't want a library of guide books to be taking up space in the trunk.
edit: There is even a bigger problem with your site, the prices do not match even close, see "kotimaailma" - the actual price is not even close to the price you display.
edit2: Or is the price per night? Not the whole stay?
There's also the question of fees, and we haven't handled that as well as we need to. For example, Airbnb adds fees on during checkout that aren't included in their landing pages. When we include those fees, which we do right now, it looks like our prices are too high. But we keep them there anyway so that there is a fair comparison with other accommodations options.
After I wrote the above I also found https://www.myscenicdrives.com -- which makes it almost to the MVP level, though it's very clunky to use.
Heck I've done the equivalent of screen scraping by visiting tripadvisor and lonely planet thorntree forums and even that was not enough. I tried a new site called triptips.com and found they had good balance of human intervention from locals to simplify the hardest part of travel planning.
Its relatively easy to book a flight or hotel or air bnb. The hard part I've always found is determining which hotel makes sense given what i want to do at the destination. should i rent a car and so on..
A trend that I've noticed is that many people don't put much effort in trip planning. Their workflow is basically read travel blogs, talk to friends, pick a couple of big points of interest, book a place that seems nearby to some things, and rely on mobile internet/concierge/locals for everything else. And maybe aside from finding the best place to stay, I haven't seen people consider the other steps to be pain points.
So I too don't think the seasonal argument holds up, it's just about quality and marketing.
"26 cities available for the United States" ? I'm not visiting some big famous city by air; I'm going on a road trip. Looking at the list, I'm going to be at two of them, but I'm also going to travel through New Orleans, Kansas City, Springfield, MO, Memphis, TN, and about 100 smaller towns on the way. The point isn't to get to (e.g.) Orlando ASAP, it's to have fun on the way.
Regardless, if I have to list each town individually, the site is almost worthless, because I can instead just Google the destinations myself. It looks like I can accumulate lists of destinations IN a town, but for anyone who's traveling by car, a travel site that only shows the most famous attractions in a small number of big cities is doing no one a favor.
Have been a dormant user of Ycombinator for some time. I have been researching on this topic for the last 4-5 years. To be really honest I think TripHobo.com does not fit SomeCallMeTim's use case. I think Roadtrippers.com may fit the bill. Having said that, I am a big fan of TripHobo.com. I have seen the portal evolve for sometime and I see it as the closest solution to fixing travel planning I have my reasons here: 1) The only source which gives you draft itineraries created by other users. This is immensely useful as i can see what other are planning to my destination. I planned a trip to Rome using TripHobo.com and i find it immensely useful.. 2) If you hit Plan my trip button, the TripPlanning functionality is awesome. You can add almost all attractions in a city to your trip plan and you can hit the optimize button, you get an automated route planned. What TripHobo claims is that the route plans generated are not only optimized for distance but also for opening and closing times of attractions. I think this is really cool. No one does it so easily.. not even google! 3) The ease of usage: This is the most easy to use portal for trip planning.
Limitations: I think there is only one limitation as SomeCallMeTim pointed out.. Limited number of cities .. I counted the number of cities manually in August last year, i could find 171 cities to which i could plan trips to. I counted again on 5th october 2014 and i found that there were 243 cities. Today i saw that they have changed their interface to a search bar and hence I am not able to determine how many cities are enabled on Triphobo.com.. If they go on increasing the number of cities to which one can plan his/her trip to say 3000-4000 cities around the world.. i think TripHobo.com will have fixed travel planning for sure. My 2 cents!
I am also tracking folks like roadtrippers, mygola and tripomatic. To me these (along with TripHobo) are the leading 4 travel planning players today. MyGola has been a disappointment..Tripomatic is difficult to use..Roadtrippers and TripHobo are i think getting some serious traction .. Roadtrippers has primary focus on roadtrips whereas TripHobo is a holistic leisure travel solution if they are able to scale their content..
My girlfriend insisted for years on how great Triple-A was and wouldn't take any of my suggested routes (I live for road trips, I've driven all over North America). Triple-A routed her from South Dakota to North Carolina via every toll-road and congested interstate there was (Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh). I said drive down to St. Louis and enjoy a toll-free drive through the Kentucky and West Virginian countryside. She went with Triple-A's route on the way out and spent who knows how much money on tolls just to sit in Chicago's traffic. Took my route back and got a beautiful ride through Appalachians in the fall.
I'm planning a road trip. And I have been actively searching for a "road trip planner" site.
Whatever Yahoo had at the link he mentioned apparently is gone; it just goes to the Yahoo Travel page.
And everything else I found was complete garbage. "Wrap a Google Maps Directions page with something to put pins in the map near the route for certain categories of attractions" is as far as any of them went.
I don't know what Yahoo's "Trip Planner" was about, but given the overall lack of ANYTHING like a decent road trip planner available, I'd have to guess that it also sucked. Otherwise some of the competing sites would have stolen at least SOME of the obvious features.
What was missing, you ask?
1. Some way to tally up a list of interesting sites. Showing me sites along a route is only about 20% of the way to being interesting; before these sites I could Google cities on the way to find destinations to visit. Actually providing more value than Google already provides is critical.
2. A way to print out area maps and contact details for each of the interesting sites.
3. A way to sort the sites and travel details by day (I'm planning a multi-day road trip).
This is for the MVP, and shouldn't take a competent developer more than a week working with Google APIs or equivalent. A good developer should be able to crank this out in a day or two. I'm tempted just so I can use the functionality to plan my trip!
I have to assume that the dozen or more sites that I looked at were made by people thinking "I'll make a road trip planner!", but who had never taken a road trip. Or who were copy-and-paste developers who could figure out just enough of the APIs to get a basic Google Directions view going, but more complexity was beyond them.
Bonus features (post MVP):
* List the cities at both ends of the road trip and the KINDS of places you might like to visit, and suggest various route options along with the unique stops you could make on the way.
* After you list the places you want to go and how many hours you want to spend at each, plan the driving stops and an optimized order of visiting the destinations. "Day 3: Get up, go to X restaurant near your hotel, drive 2 hours to Y museum, lunch at Z restaurant, then spend 3 hours at the museum across the street..."
* Include AirBNB locations on the map in addition to hotels, but ONLY show both near the end of a day's drive (corollary: give it a range of how many hours you want to be driving per day).
* Let me put in preference categories of food, and after planning a route, look for restaurants near where we'll be at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Double-plus bonus: Only recommend restaurants that are open at the time I'll be there. (Yes, Google does have a first approximation of this information, though it's often spotty.)
* Let me (easily!) blacklist specific businesses or chains. I hate calling up a map with that shows 15 restaurants in an area, and where I would only ever go to 2 of them, and having to click on all the dots until I find the right ones. Google Maps needs this feature!
* Let me filter attractions that get terrible reviews, so they don't clutter up my map -- and pull in reviews from Google AND TripAdvisor (assuming they let you?) and other sites. In some small towns, you might have one review on Google and one more on TripAdvisor -- if there are a ton on both it doesn't matter, but if there are only a few, even one more can be relevant.
Is this a good business plan? Heck if I know. I only know that I really want a site that does all of this right now (or at least points 1-3). And I sure-as-heck would remember a site like that and find it again when I took my next road trip. Bookmarks are magic ways to supplement your memory. No idea how many people still do road trips, though. Maybe more would if they had the right tools, and knew what awesome places can be found in the middle of nowhere, then it would be more popular?