CREATE, COLLABORATE, TRAVEL!

Planooze

Make touristic experiences more enjoyable with Planooze!

Antonella Cirma

Published in

Apple Developer Academy | Federico II

6 min readJun 22, 2020

D o you remember how was travelling back then, before all the online services we’re so familiar with today, just didn’t exist?

Well, some of us surely do.

You had to spend quite an amount of time in front of a map just to decide which places to visit or just to understand where to go while on your trip, not mentioning asking for directions and using a map to orientate.

And although it could seem a somewhat romantic experience, it wasn’t all fun and games.

I could never forget how difficult it was to organize travels back then, especially that time when I was young and I went on a trip with my family. I still remember the road maps that my father had in the car, they were big and difficult to fold.

My father was always the one with the responsibility of looking at the map and trying to guess the right direction… but every time we took the wrong road and got lost! Fortunately today’s technologies make life a lot easier for travellers like me.

Of course, has been our goal for the project.

What is PLANOOZE?

W e wanted to create something useful to further improve our and others’ travel experience, and although we knew we were facing a hard subject we didn’t lost confidence and started researching and doing interviews.

We scanned the market to understand what was missing and did domain researches to get a better understanding of this field.

We had a speech with several people, mostly of young age (20–30), and that was not by accident. In fact that’s the range of age in which people travel the most.

The results of the interviews were telling something quite clear: people wanted to have a simple way to organize their trips. So, we interviews have been the key that actually inspired us and gave the hint for our solution .

So, after a lot of work we finally came up with what we wanted to create. An app to make itineraries planning faster and smarter. We thought of an app that could create a route for you, leaving to the user the only responsibility of choosing the places he wants to visit.
And that is what PLANOOZE achieves.

T he core function of our app is indeed the creation of your own itineraries. You will have the possibility to personalize them as you wish, assigning a name, a date and a photo, and finally choose a starting point, add the places you’d like to visit and have your path generated automatically for you, being optimized in the sense of the distance you have to cover during your visit.

Imagine you are organizing your trip.

A lot of time spent to find the best order and path to visit all the places you are interested in, so that you can save some time to visit more.

Now, that’s not a problem thanks to PLANOOZE, since you’ll just need to choose the monuments, attractions, parks, museums etc., and the app will do the rest, also keeping you updated on the distance you’ll be covering, the time estimated to cover it and the number of places you are going to visit.

What if you don’t have your device at you finger tips?

Bring your itineraries always with you and not only on your device thanks to the iCloud support.

All the information you need at your reach.

But that’s not all.

We also thought of suggesting itineraries for the most famous places.

At first just with a packet of default tours.

Travelling is discovering, and we wanted also our app to reflect this mechanic.

And finally, here’s a look at PLANOOZE in Dark Mode, we care about your eyes! 😎

Business Stuff

Planooze is one-of-a-kind!

F or the first stage of our app we decided to follow a free business model. We know that this market is quite saturated and so we need to make people come to know us, thus enlarging our user base.

Then, we are going to introduce some freemium aspects, initially in the form of packets of itineraries. We see some potential in our app and we believe that we can manage to implement some services that will be worthy being paid for.

Future Features

Now that our project has been introduced, we can talk about where we are now and which steps we are going to take next.

Our starting point is represented by the core functionality of our app: creating your own itineraries with time optimization. But that’s just the beginning.

The next feature that is already under development is the collaboration, that would allow trip mate to create their itinerary together, thus making the process funnier and more efficient, since you won’t have to take into account your mates preferences: they will.

Another important step for our app will be the possibility to share routes on social networks and have an integration with Apple Maps, things that will make life easier for our user.

After that we’d like to implement an itineraries suggestion system, based on parameters like passions, time etc. This would be prove a grate ingredient for our app.

And finally we expect to release our app also on iPadOS, and for this purpose we are probably advantaged by the fact that we developed its interface entirely with SwiftUI, thus knowing already how to move in this relatively new world and having a good base of code.

We hope you enjoyed our work and became curious about it.

Thanks for reading our article and stay tuned!