Travel App Prototype

I'm currently planning a week-long trip to Mexico City at the end of October. While this is very exciting, it's also exposed how difficult it is (at least for me) to plan trips. Some people really excel at this, but I find all the cross-referencing of travel sites and sifting through the mountain of info about an unfamiliar place to be quite challenging.

Frustrated by this process, I created a prototype of a product aimed at making this arduous process just a little easier (hopefully). Please note, what I have is most definitely a prototype - something I cobbled together over roughly 10 days - but it contains some features and ideas that could be interesting to build out further if there's interest from people. You can check it out in the demo video below!

There are three main ideas I wanted to bring to life with this build:

1. Solve the cold start problem: It feels much easier to add/remove items from an existing itinerary than build one entirely from scratch, which is why you get an itinerary out of the box when you put in a destination in the prototype. In future iterations, we could do interesting things with this like allowing you to select an itinerary created by other travelers or professional travel agents as your starting point or perhaps having a questionnaire to learn your travel goals and using AI to generate an itinerary accordingly.

2. Centralize itinerary building in a single platform: One of the challenges I face when travel planning is the number of different tools I need to use just to build a plan - For me that's usually a combo of Google Sheets, Google Maps, and Notion. With this prototype, I attempted to bring all of that into a single platform, essentially integrating the maps interface with the itinerary building interface. This is another area where there's lots of room for improvement and experimentation (e.g. multi-player support, show travel distances, budgeting and cost-splitting tools, etc.).

3. Explore in the context of your itinerary: When I'm planning a trip, I reference a bunch of different lists from Eater, Tripadvisor, etc. I figured it would be helpful to bring that exploration into the same platform where I'm building my itinerary. This way I can see if I'll already be near any of the recommended places and seamlessly add them to my itinerary.

If you have any thoughts or feedback about this prototype or just want to chat about travel planning and what you love/hate about it, I would love to hear from you. I'm also in the market for Mexico City recs! You can reach me at prashanthselvam@gmail.com