Viral Travel

To shake off the inevitable search errors, this is NOT an essay about how viruses travel around the world, this is instead an essay about how Travel can be promoted via viral means.

I travel whenever I can, at least once a year, and one of the things I’ve heard from my fellow travelers is the absence of good travel diary apps. You can use Google Docs, somewhat, or you can try some of the other apps, but most of them are advertising supported. From my quick survey, they either emphasize pictures or text, but never balance both. The apps also offer little to no automation.

I assume there is a reason for this – money. Adding these features cost’s some serious money. But what if the travel diary was a loss leader? How about finding value in the elements the user has curated?

I’ve already written up a travel planner which has a basic interface (in this case for iPad)

The basics are pretty simple – the calendar is a drag/drop interface and the options for tours and things to do are on the left. The user scrolls through items on the left and if they are interested, they just drag the item on to their itinerary. If the user wants to book it, they would click on the item to confirm, which would work through an API for details and payments.

Here’s the interesting bit: What if we used the user’s friends’ travel diaries as one of the inputs for the left column?

I imagine the flow a bit like this:

• User A uses an interface similar to the above to make their travel itinerary.
• That itinerary then populates a similar interface to above, but it becomes an input system for creating their travel diary. 
  • There could be further tools to create an actual presentation rather than a boring slide show. Again, see https://vimeo.com/26028558 for an example (yes, I did the UX for that)
• That travel diary then becomes a shareable widget, with a single URL to be shared via Facebook/X/Bluesky/Pinterest. That URL would show a travel diary that would (hopefully) entice the viewer to “want to go to there” (30 Rock? Anyone? Anyone?).
  • A simple affordance would encourage the user to import the elements from the original itinerary/diary into the travel planner.
• The viewer then can use the chosen trip as a template, adding their own origin, dates, pax, and so forth. Each item of the itinerary (tours, meals, accommodations) could be accepted as is or modified.
  • The items could be presented in the same method as dating apps, allowing the user to swipe left/right to accept or deny.