TravelVerse

Executive summary:

People love travelling, but sometimes planning a travel can be painful. You need to check several sources only in the internet to find the best option at the best price. It can be even more problematic if you are traveling with a group, sometimes it is hard to coordinate, agree and decide the final travel plan.

 In order to optimize and improve this planning phase we proposed our solution TravelVerse. TravelVerse is the first smart virtual travel agent which helps you to plan your trips completely and supports you till the end of your trip. You will have all the information while planning and/or traveling available in one platform (best flight price, best hotel, recommended activities…). The platform will also offer collaboration functionality, so that you can exchange during the planning phase with your friends. The application will filter the information depending on your preferences and conditions which will avoid information flood and save time that you would use looking at the different sources that already exist. 

We believe that TravelVerse will completely change the way of planning travels that nowadays requires either a lot of time or money to obtain the best experience possible. 

Problem:

At first sight it seems, that nowadays thanks to the internet, planning a trip is as easy as never before. Having only in mind the information available for planning, this is definitely true. With only a few clicks flight and hotel prices can be compared, descriptions of the most interesting sightseeing attractions can be found and experiences with other travelers can be exchanged. 

2Obviously we want to make the best of our few, free days and so we collect and compare all available information to make the best deal and to find the most unique travel experience. Unfortunately this process is very time consuming. In 2014 a study showed that British people spend on average 30 hours to plan a trip (DailyMail, 2014). Another market research from Expedia shows, that on average people visit 38 different websites before they book a trip (Expedia Solutions, 2015). If the trip is planned in a group it gets even more complicated: How can the gathered information shared within in the group planning together? How can everyone bring in his feedback? And how are decisions made? Our user interviews (See Appendix ) showed that most people are not using tools designed for managing the information – and if it comes to organizing trips in a group often chat groups are used, which are clearly not the best approach to tackle this problems. 

Solution:

TravelVerse’s answer to these problems is a web service, which provides users a convenient way to plan and manage their travels and to collaborate on it. The TravelVerse’s service is a behavioral innovation and will revolutionize the way of traveling by supporting all steps during planning with smart recommendations. 

To use the service an account is required in order to store all the user related data (e.g. his travel plans and his interests). The service can be accessed with different clients (e.g. smartphone app, web browser). 

The following graphic provide an overview how the service works in general: 

When planning a trip firstly one user has to create a trip with some basic parameters (the destination, the duration and the budget). Afterwards all the other users have to be added as t rip members .  

As soon as the trip is created the TravelVerse core component comes into action. The recommendation engine starts creating individual suggestions for the group based on the previous trips of the members. Afterwards the user can discuss these suggestions or add new ideas by themself. As soon as they have agreed on a suggestion, the engine takes this into consideration and improves the automatic suggestions. During the whole planning process it is not necessary to plan everything upfront. The flexible system allows to add new activities at any time. 

When the group has agreed on an idea, the system provides additional helpful tips, which help to avoid inconvenient situations during the trip. This can be trivial recommendation like: “You are travelling during rain season, bring proper clothes”, but also recommendations regarding the foreign culture or tips how to travel more sustainable. 

During the planning and the trip the group will always be able to access a summary of their trip, which contains all the bookings and plannings they made and extra information about their timeline and Budget. 

Team:

Fayán Leonardo Pardo

Ronja Jösch

Stefano Pellegrini

Fabian Nonnenmacher