Why I have created another travel planner?

With so many travel planning apps, who needs yet another one?

I’m in a tropical cafe, sipping cappuccino or tonic water, observing the individuals around me.

— What do you do? they’re ask
— A trip planner mobile app!

I can feel the facepalm moment in the air. People know plenty of planning apps. At best, the apps kiiinda help you to plan. At worst, they don’t look great, they waste your time and aim to sell something you don’t need.

I take my mobile phone (ok, it’s an iPhone) off my pocket and show how to create a personalized trip. It takes around 20 seconds and they start to get it. Seeing is believing. They ask whether a plan can be edited and nod seeing the trip adapted to their needs with just a few swipes. They feel at home and start suggesting features: add pubs, events, places to eat, set specific transportation options, book accommodations — the list goes on. Meanwhile, they download the app. I start feeling warmer inside.

There’s so much to do and while the work goes full steam, let me iterate through the reasons why I’ve decided to create a travel planner app.

To make it right

This is a major trigger (yet not the main reason, keep reading). Nowadays, when a robot can make a haircut reservation, the travel apps still show long lists of hotels, transportations and attractions to choose from. There’s no “magic glue”.

What can be said about so most of the apps that call themselves a “travel planner”?

• They help to organize all the bookings in a syndicated nice view, complemented with location-based data (TripIt advertised as “highest-rated trip planner and flight tracker” is a good example, ). Nicely presenting something is not planning.
• They suggest all kinds of attractions to visit (TripAdvisor would be a good example). Suggesting actually means “not taking a responsibility for the results”.

Itini plans for you, producing an actionable plan you can use from the moment zero. Furthermore, you can manually tailor the plan even tighter to your needs, changing places and durations of stay. With every alteration Itini always checks that the plan makes sense, validating working hours, distances, time estimations and many more constraints (read here for details). Itini is a smart “glue” that syndicates all the travel-related services into a plan that knows you. There is no mobile app alike on the market.

To build a cutting-edge product

The software world is shifting from imperative to a declarative paradigm. Simply said, instead of telling how to solve the problem, we prefer to specify what we want to get, expecting the algorithm to find the answer.

A real-life example of an imperative approach: imagine talking to a barman like “Take 2 spoons of rose water, 1 measure of gin, 2 measures of tonic soda, put a few drops of lemon juice, 3 cubes of ice, shake it all and pour into a highball glass, decorating it with a slice of lemon”. We’d rather say “gin-tonic, not too much ice”. That would be declarative, by the way.

The “next step” for the declarative approach is not to describe the outcome in full but rather let the algorithm to fill in all the missing parts, automatically. For example: surprise me with a drink, I like gin or tequila, not too strong, preferably with citrus notes.

Personal assistants that are capable to figure out most of the things from the context are a hot subject for a long time (remember Jarvis?). I’ve decided to build such an assistant for the travel domain which I understand well, so I can tweak the algorithm till great results are provided.

To pick a challenge that takes guts to proceed with

Travel planning app is a hard case for many reasons: the entire industry is a red ocean, travelers are very picky customers and investors see B2C products as potentially riskier than B2B. Also, the personalization subject is tricky as it’s hard to create an algorithm that actually knows you. Nevertheless, to me, hard problems are the most interesting to solve from both technological and business perspectives. The higher risk might lead to a higher reward.

To learn how to build my own venture

Experience is everything. I’m grateful for the two hardest bosses I had an opportunity to work with at Natural Intelligence and Agoda. They are very smart and very demanding professionals. The more it hurts, the better you learn :) Yet, while getting better at communication and execution I’ve always wanted to do things “my way”.

Building a company (even a small one) is a terrifically interesting task. Hiring the right people (for full- or part-time) for the team I’m really proud to be a part of, setting up the right tools and processes, defining responsibilities, negotiating terms, planning budgets, coaching the employees, managing a geographically-distributed team, scaling the company (and downscaling it when COVID season started) — such a hands-on experience is hard to over-estimate.

Few specific skills when it comes to bootstrapping a start-up company: countless pitches to users, investors, potential cooperations, building financial models, writing a business plan, designing user acquisition strategy… a long way ahead to master so many things.

To help people to turn complex things into simple

This is my main reason. “What can I do during 3 weeks vacation in Thailand?”. The question is naive, the answer (the actual plan) is fairly simple, but the process to get a proper answer to the question is far from simple. People spend lots and lots of time trying to combine all the trip components and for most of them, it’s not fun (link to my other article)!

There is a big gap between having nothing to start from and having some nice actionable plan to tweak to your needs. Not only the planning with Itini is very fast and effective, but we’ve also invested a lot of expertise and effort to end up with an amazing user experience: nice looking, informative and fast, served on the compact screen, working literally at your fingertips.

Material indicators of success

Last but not least, Itini is a business venture, aimed at full-fledged commercial success. Yet, it’s early to think what would I do with the money and there’s a long way ahead.

My main priority is to become an ultimate travel planner, worldwide.

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