I like to be well-prepared when I go on a trip abroad. I try not to cramp too many things in one day. At the same time, my itinerary needs to be optimized so I can
So I always try to get the opinion of locals to understand if a particular itinerary works or not. Perhaps, there is a way to optimize my routes better? Perhaps, I did not notice that a particular attraction may not be open during the months I plan to visit?
For this, I post my plans on Reddit and various country related forums. I always get helpful responses that I use to tweak my plans.
But this process is so messy – in a typical message board, you get responses from dozens of people, and they are not always consistent. For instance, if you want to visit the Taj Mahal, there are some who may advise you to visit the place early in the morning to avoid the crowd and the heat. But there are also going to be a good number of people who will recommend an evening visit to view the sunset.
What if we could build a collaborative itinerary planner - where anybody could pick and edit an existing itinerary to create a new one? This will give you dozens of different itineraries to pick and choose from.
The workflow
User clicks on ‘Create new itinerary’ and this launches an interface where they can copy-paste their itinerary from MS Excel or Google Spreadsheets (or type it all in from scratch)
User clicks ‘Submit’ to publish their itinerary that can be shared publicly
Other users may click ‘Edit itinerary’ to make changes to the original itinerary. This is published as a new itinerary.
Any visitor to the website will now be able to view the master itinerary and the edited child-itineraries. Each of these child-itineraries can further have more edits – so there is plenty of options for any traveler to pick and choose from.
In addition to this, bonus points if you can also make this itinerary embeddable since that will help you a great deal in marketing the product.
Quick shoutout to HandsOnTable.com that offers a really easy way for you to create spreadsheet like interfaces on the web. I have used this app for a few different applications and their free version is amazing by itself.
How do you market this product
As I see it, there are two very sustainable traffic channels for this business. The first is, of course, social. You may start off asking itinerary related questions on various traffic forums and hope that the product catches traction. But that is not going to happen. What you could however do is reach out to various travel related subreddits and forums and ask them to feature your product on their website. It’s a helpful tool that might garner interest. You may also advertise on these websites if you have got the budget.
The second channel is Organic Search and Content Marketing – and this is a huge channel to target. Keywords with “itinerary” in them are searched between 100K to 1 million times each month. More specifically, according to the Google Ads Planner, there are between 1000 to 10,000 searches for keywords like “NYC itinerary” and “Paris itinerary” while other destinations like Milan see between 100 to 1000 searches every month.
A comprehensive itinerary database can fetch you hundreds of thousands of pageviews each month that can then be monetized through ads and affiliate marketing (ticketing and tour planning websites). Visitors also have high purchase intent (for travel-related products and services) and so conversion rate is high.
You can expand your reach further by creating embeddable itineraries. This allows travel bloggers to embed their itinerary advice using your application on their website. This increases your outreach further and can also build backlinks to your website at the same time.
