Day 2 of #productidea — The post-travel guide
This is part of my #productidea 30 day challenge on which each day I write about a new product idea.
We all have used travel guides to help us plan our trips. Sometimes we have start reading them months in advance and other times we have opened them on the airport. Some people still buy paper travel guides and others use apps on their mobile phones. In fact, I am a bit responsible for the latter as I co-founded TouristEye, a travel guide app used by over 1M travelers and bought by Lonely Planet. Expect more travel ideas in the future ;)
A year and half ago I was planning my road trip to Belgium, The Netherlands and West Germany, when this idea crossed my mind.
Most people don’t read the long introduction pages of the travel guides. They are busy with work and preparing the suitcase before the trip, they are enjoying the trip during it and when they return home they keep the travel guide in the closet. But, what if we had a post-travel guide?
The post-travel guide
This guide could be a two weeks newsletter that you receive after you’ve finished your trip. The first day we ask you which topics have interested you more of the trip, and over two weeks we send you articles, videos, films or podcasts about them. The objective is to help the traveler extend the enjoyment of his trip, combat the post travel depression and learn more of what is of his interest.
For example, which topics could we choose about Amsterdam?
- How the dam and lock system works (how it’s drained, how buildings are repaired)
- How the city has grown from its origins (what have they needed to build)
- Amsterdam under the reign of Spain (yes, we owned it)
- The inclined houses
- The boat houses
- Goods that were handled by Amsterdam
- The Dutch East India Company
- The story of Anne Frank
- The transport strike with the Nazis
- Amsterdam in 2014 (tourists, cost of living, industry, unemployment, problems, challenges, etc.)
As you can imagine, a lot of content is needed to cover the world; but it should be possible to cover one city per month as a side project. No tech required!
