Day 7 of #productidea — Nearby weekend getaways

This is part of my #productidea 30 day challenge on which each day I write about a new product idea.

I haven’t found yet a better place to search for nearby weekend getaways than my father’s library. He has collected thousands of them from books and magazines; he even has broken apart books to organize the destinations better. The last magazine to be broken apart was this one from Hola (a fashion and gossip Spanish magazine), which has in fact lots of interesting ideas.

If you currently search for “weekend getaways” or its equivalent in Spanish “escapada fin de semana” you’ll find two types of websites: most of them want to sell you flights, hotels or activities and the others are blogs or magazines with articles titled “top 10 weekend getaways for…”.

The best websites for finding ideas are blogs from regular people who share their experiences. But you usually find them when you are searching more information about a specific destination. Commercial websites dominate on SEO. In USA there are some travel magazines that have done a decent job on weekend getaways (Travel and Leisure and Fodor’s), but it’s not enough. You’ll probably get better information buying a book.

The idea is to build a repository of weekend getaway destinations you can go around Madrid (for example) filtering them by season, by trip length (from one to four days) and by activities you can do (food, hiking, culture, nature, etc). We could link to articles from other websites, we could write our own or we can even crowdsource them.

The key point is to focus on the user experience of the traveler (find an weekend getaway) and not on selling him hotels or activities. There are enough of those, and they end up all being the same websites having the same activities to sell us.