Considerations for Your Travel App

Technology has made it possible to do a lot more from anywhere and everywhere, including making travel arrangements and planning for vacations or business. For developers it is a tricky job to establish the right balance between being helpful and being overwhelming. This is why so many apps specialize in just one or two aspects of the travel industry. For example, Airbnb focuses on places to stay and Lyft focuses on ride shares.

tech
December 5, 2020
Considerations for Your Travel App

Technology has made it possible to do a lot more from anywhere and everywhere, including making travel arrangements and planning for vacations or business. For developers it is a tricky job to establish the right balance between being helpful and being overwhelming. This is why so many apps specialize in just one or two aspects of the travel industry. For example, Airbnb focuses on places to stay and Lyft focuses on ride shares.

There are many different aspects to traveling that you will need to take time to decide exactly what service or services you want to provide, then determine how you want to offer them. Here is how you can best develop an app around your products or services.

Focus on One Aspect and Become an Expert

The travel industry is a very competitive one because there is such a high demand for easy access to tools that assist with traveling. This means that you should find one product or service that you can become an expert in and offer something that will stand out in a competitive field.

It may be possible to offer more services or goods later, but at least in the beginning, you should keep your app as simple as possible. If you are already in the travel business, you will want to offer everything in the app that you already offer, but you will need to prioritize which aspects you want to offer first. The more complicated you make the app, the longer it will take to get it to the market.

If you are new to the industry, focus on just the one aspect you are considering. This will help you gain a reputation and potentially lead to more services or goods later on as you expand.

Here are the most common types of services in the industry:

  • Transportation, both local and long-distance
  • Accommodations
  • Sightseeing
  • Food
  • Niche activities
  • Family friendly venues
  • Weather and news

You can brainstorm ideas that may not be typical but that you think may catch on as well. It’s providing a service that no one has considered before that can give you a huge lead over the competition.

Determining the Right Features

What users can do in your app is going to depend on what service or goods you have on offer. That said, there are a few things that are fairly universal.

  • Access to a map will be essential for virtually any travel app. People are going to either need to know how to get somewhere or to see how long they will need to wait for a car, train, or other mode of transportation.
  • Method of storing payment. People want the choice to be able to store their information or not. The majority of customers who make purchases through the app are going to want their data stored so that they don’t have to enter it every time they access the app.
  • Comments and reviews are something that you will want to encourage because that is how more people will start to learn about the app.
  • If you are helping travelers going abroad, you should consider adding either a link to a currency converter or a way of converting currency. The biggest problem with this is that it will need to be reliable so that customers can quickly learn the exchange rate from your app.

Depending on what services or goods you are offering, you may need to add some ability to translate or recommendations to help the traveling client.

App Access

Allowing your app to access other apps or to be accessed from other apps is going to be an expectation, no matter what kind of app you develop. People prefer to be able to quickly access different things all with a couple of taps instead of having to return to the home screen and scroll through all of the icons.

The following are some of the key apps that people should be able to access from your app.

  • Geolocation will need to be active to ensure that people can quickly locate where they are as they travel.
  • A planner will be incredibly helpful, and it will likely need to interact with their calendar or set alarms.
  • You will want to be allow access to cameras and possibly the device’s microphone.
  • Phone calls and emails should be easy to access with a simple tap in your app. This means you will need to make the contact information interactive from within the app.

Security

Most travel apps require that people make payments over them. If your app updates based on information from a person’s financial institutions, you need to make sure that your security is incredibly robust. If your app gets hacked, it could compromise the financial information for all of your users. You will need to budget a lot more to securing accounts and regular maintenance to keep security current.

A Quick Check List

Travel apps are completely unique because people will largely use them to better enjoy their vacations and simplify business travel. The following is a quick checklist of things you need to consider so that you don’t miss anything important:

  • Both online and offline access to maps
  • Location tracking
  • Services related to making purchases and booking
  • Payment gateway with optional methods to save the data
  • A planner
  • Ability to create itineraries or quickly access them
  • Method of tracking information, such as weather or nearby activities/events

You will need to plan the launch around the baseline of what you want to offer when you first launch. Make sure you don’t take on more than you can successfully launch if you have a tight deadline. Prioritizing is critical to making a successful travel app.