Introduction 

Living through the lockdown(s) and craving travel, the Product team at Byteridge brings a product idea to enhance the travel experience for individuals having the Wanderlust Bug. 

We are going to break it down in the following manner 

  • Voice of the customer 
  • Competition and what is being provided 
  • Identify Target Users  
  • User journey and their pain points  
  • Ideate on Features 
  • Roadmap and Prioritize 
  • Risks 
  • Tech stack 
  • Final thoughts 

 

Travel Industry - Voice of customer

We heard you! The travel industry is picking up pace post the lockdowns and we see some trends are picking up

  • Experiences (Local/ unique) 
  • Solo travel 
  • Responsible Travel 

Various reports from the industry like hashtag usage on social media, Booking.com, McKensie, and responsibletravel.org have made us believe that these are the top three items which are on the rise over the last few years prior to the travel restriction situation we faced. 

 

Competition and what is being provided 

To meet the cravings of the travellers there are various products/ product features have been introduced 

Experience Economies: 

  • AirBnb Experiences: Local things to do and allowing local economies to build 
  • Withlocals: Book private tours and activities with locals around the world 
  • Agoda Activities for local experiences 
  • Google Explore: Whats happening around me

Travel Applications: 

  • TripAdvisor 
  • Expedia 
  • Credit card services for travel 
  • Airlines and travel applications 

Traditional Travel Agents: 

  • Big and small agencies for booking trips and travel 

There are many players at various levels of travel services to meet the needs of travellers.  

 

Let's dig a little deeper and see if there really is a need 

 

Identify Target Users and their pain points 

For the sake of this writeup let's look at the following user types (limiting scope).  

  1. Weekenders – shorter travels 
    • Solo
    • Group (Friends and family)
  2. Vacationers - longer travels 
    • Solo
    • Group (Friends and Family)
  3. Workcationers 
    • Solo
    • Group (colleagues)

 

User journey and their pain points 

Thinking about travel we naturally tend to do the following 

  • Discover – Deciding where to go and what to do and when to go 
  • Plan – Planning the trip how to go, where to stay, where to get things like needs ie food, entertainment, sustainability etc 
  • Activate – Booking, Booking, Booking – Travel, stay and activities 
  • During the trip – Access to tickets and bookings, Locations, directions 
  • Post-trip – Make memories, collate photos, final expenses and sustainability 

Let's quickly put the pain points together 

  Discovery Planning Activation During the trip Post Trip
How users meet their needs now Asking friends, reading reviews etc. and travel blogs  Using travel aggregators or agencies to do bookings etc. Aggregator websites and ask travel agencies to do bookings Remembering the itinerary, setting up reminders manually or google services to identify them for you  Editing videos, posting on social media 
Current Pain Points AI-enabled personal and group likes and dislikes, Reviewing authenticity and highlighting issues, Determining   Pricing transparency, access to the tickets and itinerary. Planning stops, distances etc for shorter by-road travels Too much back and forth to decide on timings and people's needs Access to tickets, Smarter and timely notifications, Spontaneous potential things to do   Time-consuming, delays as we get busy with daily schedules

 

Looking at the pain points that are listed under each item there seems to be a laundry list of features that can help bridge the gap and serve the users in a hassle-free trip experience.

 

Ideate on Features

Largely thinking and putting a little thought on the pain points we see the following features emerging

Journey Step Feature Name Impact to User Complexity Remarks
Dicovery Create User profile capture preferences High Low  
Dicovery Use data from other sources to build preferences High Medium  
Dicovery Create trips through recommendations or on demand Medium High  
Dicovery Add people to trips and share trip ideas with the group Medium Low  
Discovery  Multiple trips with a trip having multiple ideas, voting within the group Low Low  
Discovery  AI Enabled recommendations in terms of user preferences, reviews, and travel date ideas High High Recommendation Accuracy
Planning Smart recommendations using user preferences, additional information, historical choices. Considering pricing preferences, location preferences Medium High Recommendation Accuracy
Planning Checkpoint recommendations and stops recommendations High Medium  
Planning Downloading maps for hard to reach areas Medium Low Map provider downloading maps for the journey
Activation Itinerary-based booking considering timings and receiving and filing booking confirmations in the trip folder High low Integrations with external providers for booking and payments
During the Trip Smart notifications considering time to reach an appointment Medium High  
During the Trip Access to booking confirmations and tickets for individual and group  Medium Low  
During the Trip Spontaneous activity recommendations Low Low  
Post Trip Create curated memories, timelines and collages and the sustainability score for the trip to brag about High Medium  

* Please note the Impact and Complexity are many a times subjective

 

Roadmap and Prioritise

Phew! That's a long list of features based on the concepts discussed in our Product roadmapping and Product prioritization thoughts we will use the impact and complexity to see what our MVP would be 

Priority 1: All High and Medium Impact and Low Complexity

Priority 2: All High and Medium Impact and Medium Complexity

Priority 3: All High and Medium Impact and High Complexity

Priority 4: All Low Impact and Medium and Low Complexity

Priority 5: Remainder

As for the Product Roadmap, we will logically club or treat these as individual items and a rough engineering sizing will provide a great timeline which can represent what is happening and when. in terms of development, Go to Market, recruit focus group, beta release, User testing, User recruitment and final release.

 

Risk 

Providing these features could potentially have some unwanted impacts 

  • Is this optimally solving a problem needs to be tested
  • Spontaneity has compromised, a flavour has been added in case time permits
  • Trip may not be the right one potentially there could be better-referred trips based on price or experience

 

Final thoughts 

The features truly seem to provide a holistic travel planner, travel manager and travel wallet product. For a product to survive and continue to provide its benefits to the users it needs a revenue stream (we didn't elaborate on this as we will work towards acquiring, engaging and retaining users) which in this case can be generated through profit sharing with travel sites and agencies, selling prefered spots and priority in recommendations. 

 

Finally, we would have loved to discuss metrics around L1 L2 metrics, the Northstar metric and the business-specific metrics which we will cover in a separate blog.