Travel as a Service: How to Develop a Travel Platform
The travel industry has immense potential. It is dynamic, ever-changing, and it keeps engaging diverse audiences. There are different factors enhancing the role of travel – including the growing availability and simplicity of travel services. For those who want to start a business in this industry, the best option is to build an online travel platform. Here’s what will help you do right.
Know your audience
If you decide to create travel software, you need to know what’s happening in the industry and your place in it. As social media makes clear, travel is a huge part of the modern lifestyle of every generation in the workforce.
Experience is showing that Millennials value experiences more than material goods, which is why they prefer traveling to acquiring physical items. Such a life philosophy is both the product and the determining factor in the success of low-cost airlines and surface transport. Information, tickets, and accommodations are available via mobile phones, and no one needs third-party agencies to help them plan their trip.
However, if you want to introduce a new product in a market that is already big and diverse, you need to pinpoint your audience and figure out what role travel plays in their life.
To be relevant and compete with today’s market giants, entrepreneurs with new products must know everything about their prospective customers. It’s important to know why people travel, what they expect from their trips and their overall opportunities in life. The more travel platform developers know about their audience, the better their chances of building a service they will love, use, stick to, and recommend to their friends.
What to Keep in Mind when Building a Travel Platform
There are already loads of accommodation search services, flight booking aggregators, and sources of travel advice. To create something that will resonate with your audience, you have to ensure that it is genuinely useful, easy to use, and speaks the same language they do.
Your audience
If you want to develop a travel platform, the best strategy is not to fight the established leaders, but to approach a narrow audience that has specific interests. It can be dedicated to surfers, music festival fans, family travelers or sports nuts. By targeting a niche audience, you have an opportunity to become the preferred travel companion for that niche. Your users will see you as a trustworthy source of information that is particularly interesting to them. The smaller your niche, the easier it will be for you to understand and meet their needs.
The user experience
If you want to create a travel booking website, you have to make it either adaptable for mobile platforms or create a standalone app for it.
You should identify when users will need your service – whether it’s during the planning stage or during the trip itself. Either way, it still must be available from any device. And remember: a tidy UX is as just important to the success of your future business as the quality of the service. In fact, the UX is a part of it.
The rapid march of technology and modern life teach people anything but patience, so making your app understandable and intuitive is worth the effort.
The technology
Today, users are used to having their device read their thoughts and predict their needs. This ability has to be embedded both within the service interface and the opportunities it offers the traveler (including through travel API integration). That’s why it’s a good idea to build a travel website using artificial intelligence (AI) technology that will provide the user with highly relevant suggestions and options that enhance their travel experience. By the way, find out more about why Python is better to use for AI.
Bonus: Tips from within the Industry
Every person on a software development team wants to build a product they’re genuinely proud of. But it takes Thousands of steps and a world of knowledge to create a reliable and profitable service. It’s not an easy job. As an experienced travel website development company that’s invested in the success of its clients, we’ve collected and summarized the best recommendations on how to build a great travel service. Every tip is based on the first-hand experience. If you want to learn how we approached all the challenges outlined above, check out our ebook and get one step closer to your goal – an online travel service your users will love.
Fortunately, everything you need to know before entering this space is the ebook “Travel as a Service: How to Develop a Travel Platform”, published by our web development company to help emerging businesses.
Here we share our best practices, technical solutions, management tips, and every useful insight we’ve got while working on our projects
