The path to an idea: Tripάρω — Part 1
Usually the main idea belongs to a single person. The other team members enhance, correct and alter the original concept. That wasn’t our story though. No one can be credited with coming up with the idea we finally chose to implement. Our concept is the product of relentless brainstorming and joining of different ideas. Ultimately, we agreed on designing a travel planning service which we are proud of. First things first though.
Who are we
Nena Nikolaou, a 22-year old mom. Her one-year- old daughter, Victoria, is her sun and stars. However, she meant business when she decided to enroll to this year’s labs and has been irreplaceable ever since.
Rebecca Bacharnikou,31, has been working for a bank for the last decade. At age 29 she sat again the exams and is now a working third year student. Constantly on the run, always active.
Maria Zioga, 21, our youngest. Dreams big. The one that brought our group together. She is leaving for Austria (Erasmus) next semester.
Maria Kakoliri, 23, one of the best dancers of her generations and very creative as well. Her sister is in Advertising (runs in the family).
We all study Media and Public Relations at Panteion University — Department of Communication, Media and Culture. Our challenge for this semester at AdandPR Lab #DigitalCreativity_CodeAppsGamesLab by our professors, Dr. Betty Tsakarestou and Dr. Stavros Kaperonis, was to come up with a business idea and actualize it though a website and an app.
Our Golden Circle
The “Golden Circle” is a concept introduced by Simon Sinek. Sinek argued that world’s leading communicators, whether we think of individual or companies, always include three elements in their speech:
- What are we selling?
- How do we add value to our products?
- Why does our organization exist?
The last one is clearly the most important (the “heart” of the circle). Sinek explains that making profits is a result, not a purpose.
While designing Tripάρω, we used those principle to create our own Golden Circle.
- Why? Because travelling is supposed to be fun! We wish to reduce time-consuming preparations and arrangements to a minimum. Our users should be able to enjoy the experience while we take care of the rest.
- How? By combining every service users are going to need before, during and after their trip, into a single app/website.
- What? Tripάρω is an integrated travel planning service.
The Idea
At first we thought we could provide a planning service for guest DJ’s in music festivals, like Coachella and Tomorrowland. Who would fly them there? Where would they stay? “Build houses for Coachella” came up as our moto. However, someone argued that those needs are taken care of by festival organizers. We decided to offer these services to fans instead. Again, doing our research, we realized that the organizers of international music festivals have already done a good job in this department, having websites and apps to address most of their fans needs. “So, what if we designed a travel planner for tourists instead?”. And we did.
Features
Tripάρω is a service that aims to organize everything the user might need into a single app/website. Our service addresses the following basic needs:
Accommodation
Transportation
Important Info
Places to Visit
Daily planner
Packing organizer
Important features include the time calculator that provides the final countdown for the selected trip and the Notifications screen. The user is going to receive several notifications before, during and after his trip. We provide all transportation options (airplane, ship, train, car) as well as different types of accommodation (hotels, airbnb etc).
That’s the difference between our app and what is already out there. When we decided to go for this project, our idea was innovative in our minds. Nonetheless, we searched for similar applications. We came across at least four existing travel planning apps. Some of them where quite satisfactory, though deficient. There was no single app that combined all necessary features. Users would have to use three of four separate applications/websites to design their trip. Our goal was to create an end to end service that makes time-consuming web searches redundant.
What if we were to actually launch this?
We are really proud about the ‘’Tripάρω’’ project and we believe that it could become a real, professional project that works and it could be really successful. However, the builder we had to use lacks important functionalities (we break down the challenges we faced in the second part of this post). We think that with a few changes, this project could be even better and provide more options to the users.
Specifically, the first thing we would change if we were to actually launch the app is that when the user searches for the airline tickets or for the accommodation, all the information would be integrated on the web site/application, so there would be no redirection to a new window and to a new web site. ‘’Tripάρω’’would be affiliated with airline and accommodation businesses.
Moreover, the web site/ application would provide more information about the attractions, museums, galleries, festivals, performances, night clubs, restaurants and generally all the activities that a traveler could possibly do at the place they visit. In that way the user would be fully informed about the place they visit even before they actually visit it.
It would also be nice if the users could give us feedback about the services we provide to them and let us know what they think about our web site and our application.
Monetization
To begin with, one of the most common ways to make money in the digital world is affiliate marketing . In theory, we are affiliated with Booking and Airbnb, Skyscanner, Viva etc. Since we promote them, we are to receive commissions based on the traffic we drive to their sites. We would also receive commissions from certain museums, restaurants and shops since we offer coaching services.
Another way to monetize our idea is ad revenue. Google AdSense. With Google AdSense we simply place the banner on our triparo app and google chooses ads relevant to our content. We are getting paid when our users click on the ads.
