1. upon loading, the web site immediately asks permissions for sending notifications and access to my location - that's too early and because of that, of course, "No, thanks". Notifications about what? Location - why? Since it's not mobile app and I didn't read the description before installing it, the request should be done only after some explanation of service is provided.
2. False data (and this ruins the whole idea). The trip from Moscow to Iceland is unlikely to cost $500 for two nights/two adults and when your service shows 5500 Rub per night average price for stay, it does not offer any accommodation less than 80KRub per night. Finding the flights at declared price is impossible: there's no UI to specify dates, as requested by error message (and minimal prices cannot be found by search on specific dates anyway).
All that said, it's too early to discuss the result - fix the bugs and UX issues first.
The concept is interesting. I admit I had the same reaction to the notification & location request popping up right away. What will I be notified about? Why are you wanting my location? What will you be doing with that information?
- As I've entered my area, it would be useful if the "from airport" on the result page would default to "area airports"
- I'd like a map view of the destinations
- I'd like to be able to filter the lodging accommodations based on stars and type (personal home, BnB, hotel) as there are some regions in the world that I've learned to only use hotels when it's sight-unseen and without recommendation
I'm normally a huge map fan, but I actually like it the way it is, without a map. I had this cool moment where I thought, "It doesn't matter where in the world it is, as long as it is under your budget."
I haven't figured out how to pass all the menus after clicking a destination. I typed in an airport and clicked Search Flights, but it complains that I haven't entered dates. Can't find a place to enter them.
My brother and I would like to show you what we have been working on for the past 6 months.
What started out as a little project to learn to code together has become a full-fledged travel tool to discover destinations you wouldn't directly think of.
It's called DESTIGOGO :)
We are curious about what you think and happy to answer any questions you have!
I really want this... but its pretty broken atm.
1) Images are comically wrong. One "whoa" hit for me was "the blue mountains" in Canada, but the photo is from BANF, 3500 KM away and much more expensive. This makes me doubt all of the images, which makes the whole site somewhat useless.
2) Needs current temps instead of average. Current implementation has quirks like sending you to Winnipeg for sun.
3) Can't book/find dates where you can get these prices. So I can't even comment on if they are real and/or use the site for its intended purposes.
4) shouldn't suggest a holiday where I'm coming from.
keep at it though, if this worked as advertised it could be my go to site for booking vacations.
1) I think that's an incident, we've collected all the images by hand - so the error rate should be very low. Apparently we made a mistake for the blue mountains, canada - so thanks for mentioning :)
2) True, we'll implement current temps very soon :)
3) Working on that, for now you need to select an airport from the dropdown list to ensure that the dates become visible.
4) Sure, we'll fix that.
Thank your for your feedback yaur. That would be awesome :)
Hello,
I tried looking at an example trip, and when I asked it to show flights it popped up an error saying I needed to input the dates of the flight. There does not seem to be any field to pick the date in, though?
1) True, but it belongs to Zakynthos island, where Tsivili is located. Sometimes we had to choose for a more general place near the city we are mentioning, to get a decent image. And since it is very near, we think it's ok (When you will go to Tsivili, you definately will visit Navagio beach (Shipwreck Beach).
2) Planning to!
3) Good one! Is it ok to generate it dynamically (does Google find it in then?)
4) We'll thake that into account! But we'll first focus on developing the web app further and add features :)
Google doesn't use the description and keyword meta tags anymore and I imagine that other search engines don't either. It is useful for the snippets that you see on the results page, though, if your page doesn't have much content.
Definitely cool for ideas. However I assume you are trying to monetize by getting me to buy hotels and flights through your site, which is not easy right now. I actually think I will use this, for spring break or something.
Just some initial feedback:
1) I want to specify an airport / dates before searching. I live in the DC area where there are 3 different airports prices could be from, but only like to fly out of one.
2) When I try and look at a destination, and find flights, I cannot seem to find where to add the dates, which it complains about not having.
3) Scroll wheel doesn't seem to affect zoom on the map at the location. That's taking away an expected feature of the map, and not something I like.
4) Number of people up front along with total budget. Sharing hotel rooms makes thing much cheaper where hotels are expensive. You could have a more expensive flight and go somewhere more interesting for the same amount.
5) Once I am on the results page, I might want to filter out specific countries and not just whole regions. Or I might even take a whole region, but I can't seem to add a filter after the fact.
6) Why does the 'Home' button open a new tab? If I am clicking home I want it in this tab. In fact I always want it in the current tab. I will 'Open in new Tab' if I want it in a new tab.
7) You have a way to get reminded about the site for later travel, but what if I want to book now for a Spring Break trip? How do a search for a trip 2-3 months from now? I am not planning a trip like this site is useful for last minute.
8) Maybe its just me but 'Return' flight is not what I am used to calling it. Normally that is referred to as a 'Round Trip' flight.
None of the keyboard scrolling methods work. I can't use pgdown, arrow down, even the old school "space to scroll"
On search page, changing duration erases my budget, why? Just because I might be able to stay a day or two longer, or am willing to cut my stay short, doesn't mean my budget is changing.
What is the p.p. currency? On search page I set it to USD, yet I keep seeing it p.p. everywhere?
Once I open a location destination (why a new tab?), it forgets where I am flying from, so for flight search I have to retype my city.
Awesome page, this is what I was looking for, but few minor things need to be fixed up.
Really cool tool. I was thinking about a similar project since a while, you built it, please keep it going!
Small side note, I'm not sure if it's because of the mobile version but I find it would be great to have some more details about the exact way you've found to go there (for example, when it shows the car are transportation way, how does it get this price? Is it oil price or also tolls or shared car or public transport? Didn't see any details about these).
Also，it would be great to have details about which border to cross (if any) and give some visa information according to the nationality - these info are hard to get as always changing, but it could be a real strength of this project if you could give them - as no one else really does it well.
Last cool feature, crossing the data with numbeo or nomadlist to get the cost of life in cities - and similar kind of cool stuff. That would be amazing!
Some great additional options you mention there. For now, we have chosen to take averages for most of things to keep things simple and don't have the user to think about every detail. Besides, these variables differ heavily (oil prices per country differ, fuel consumption per car too, etc.)
Visa information is a think we have planned to add very soon :) Also more additional information like that we are planning to implement soon :D
Don't assume that everyone owns a car. Especially people who are looking for cheap trips might not have one or prefer travelling by train (which works well in western europe).
Am I missing where to put in depart/return dates? I want to try to search for flights, but I keep getting that error message and I can't for the life of me find where to enter in my dates! Great looking aggregator otherwise.
The point is that you can find destinations based on your budget without being limited to certain dates. For cheap people (student) like me that are on a tight budget this is really awesome. :)
Ps. I really like how this thing is popping up everywhere, first YC group, after that PH and now HN.
Most large/successful aggregator travel sites feel like they've been "optimizing for revenue" for a long time. It's really informed the products in very fundamental way.
AirBnB is an example of vastly better than average design. But, even here I think the site has in recent years gradually been more focused around being "revenue-optimized." People browsing tree-houses in tropical rain forests they may one day visit is not optimal when compared to the "I need 3 beds in Milan next Thursday" people. To make your KPIs go up you need to direct those people who have their credit card out already to a thing that they will pay for now. This is not bad, but it does leave an opening.
Anyway... I think there is plenty of room for a travel site that emphasizes browsing. This site is fast and feels like it wants me to just browse.
Nicely done. I wish (and predict) you success, Kevin.
So found an issues, for places that don't have flights it never pops up the dates. Then when I click "Search Flights", I get a validation error for not selecting dates.
Pulling my hair I finally found a destination that had flights and the date selector displayed correctly.
It'd be super cool if you integrated Google flights with this, along with all their benefits with the flights tips etc. I've often reduced the price by hundreds of pounds, while making it much more convenient.
Good job but I don't like the concept of this being budget oriented.
It gives me the impression that my destinations can largely vary depending on intermediary (this) app rates.
Let me explain my point:
Assuming I have a budget of £X of which I search against, I should get the results of £X - £Y (middle app commission) which obviously leads me to get results for potentially lower than my budget destinations could actually be.
It gives me the sense of loss of control or lack of choice if you may.
While searching on another websites I will be able to judge wether I accept or not the asked price (including commissions), In here I won't be able to.
Cool idea. A few issues: 1.) The flight section of the /destinations/ page asks me to select a departure and return date, but lacks the field to do that. It also needlessly asks for my home airport again. 2.) The exclude regions function seems to think that Turkey is in Europe. 3.) Finland, Georgia, Russia, Poland, Canada, Colorado, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Utah are not "sunny" destinations in January.
Thank you! Thanks for all your feedback! 1) We need to fix the issue of not showing date-input-fields before a proper airport is selected. 2) Ah that's true - I guess the west part of Turkey is in Europe (note: not EU) whereas the bigger eastern part indeed is in Asia. 3) True, haha, temperatures are yearly averages at this moment. Will be current temperatures in the near future :)
Asking for airport may make sense, when there are 3 or 4 airports nearby (e.g. Moscow SVO,DME,VKO and ZIA). But that's a big question, why only travel by air considered (it's quite common and convenient to take night sleeper cars in Russia or Shinkansen in Japan).
As future improvement, it will also make sense to consider visa money/time costs (maintain matrix of visa-free destinations/visa costs/issue times) or at least add a note in UI that valid visa may be required to some destinations.
Thanks for mentioning! That's already on our list and we will implement soon, in addition we are planning to add a safety score or safety index - which is quite relevant at the moment..
Really attractive design. One thing that was a bit annoying on mobile was that there was several prompts all at once. (location, add to home, etc.) Location prompt makes sense, but you may want to save the add to home prompt for a little bit later.
I see that you're using Booking & Skyscanner, so maybe it's one of those, but where do the beautiful destination images come from?
Thanks a lot! :) I get your point, it really is a bit annoying. Fortunately these are only shown once haha.
Yes that's true, but we are only using them for flights and hotels.
The images come from Shutterstock. Firstly we hand curated 650+ destinations, then we hand picked all the images and bought them at shutterstock :') They are all beautiful, but it was a real pain in the ass selecting them haha. We did like 50 pics in 3 hours..
Best practice is to not ask for permissions upon first page load - too many people will leave immediately.
Instead, ask for them when they are relevant - for location, maybe once they click the "From" box.
For notifications, build your own in-app message explaining why the user wants notifications. If they "Accept" your own box, show them the actual notification request.
Many people, especially HN users, will have ill-will against a site that immediately wants to send pop-ups to their browsers. It feels too much like spam, trying to catch unaware users. If you explain why first, it's less intrusive.
This is nice and almost perfect, the only improvement I would like is to change the metrices, I live in South Africa and it would be very nice if I could see my prices in ZAR (South African Rands) and my Temperature in Degrees Celcius, apart from that, great site, planning a trip in March for my birthday and definitely will be using this :)
Great to hear! Ah we don't support ZAR yet. We do in Celsius, but for now it's related to USD :') So when you select another currency (EUR for example) you should see that temperatures will be changed to Celsius.
The app already asked for my location, which I granted it. Rather than make every user fix the incorrect currency, the app should pick the correct one matching the location and let them override it if they need to.
I can't get it to show results on mobile either, but have wanted something like this for a while.
One feature request is instead of putting "2 days" or "4 days" I'd like to be able to say leave on Friday afternoon, come back Sunday night, or 7 days leaving on a Friday...
Can you suggest (genuinely interested) something similar that isn't a) bloated with ads b) clearly affiliated with an airline/travel agent or c) is budget driven (high or low) - not "cheap airfare" or "cheap accom" driven? I've looked before and am yet to find something good...
I think Tripnary is doing a great job at it, though probably failing because it's a hard business to start with (they haven't updated their app since last year)
Mm that's weird.. Which browser do you use on your phone? We haven't heird of this problem yet so could you provide some more info so we can look into this? :)
This is awesome - always wanted something like this! Nice design and UX :)
A couple of small suggestions.
If I set my budget your app "fills" it leaving no room for food/in-country travel/etc. Maybe you could had a measure of how much people want to spend on such things - perhaps as a percentage but presented as fixed options (I eat out a lot, I visit attractions a lot)? Or make it more obvious somehow that this is the "bare cost" of getting to and staying somewhere.
Perhaps consider only rendering the first page or two of results - then load more in as I scroll. On my 2015 MBP it hangs a little when loading in all the tiles (in Firefox and Chrome).
Thanks for your suggestions! Since it is always questionable how much someone would spend (and very depending on the person itself) we didn't take into account cost of living. My brother and I had a few discussions about this since I wanted to show 'the whole package', but he convinced me to keep just keep it simple and add additional 'cost of living' info later on, at the destination page. For now I still agree with, he has some good points. Although it differs from person to person what is preferred.
Loading in results on page scroll should be really neat. I think it will speed up loading time tremendously, definately going to look into that!
Looks great. Will definitely try and give it a spin. How are you planning on monetizing it? Just curious, as I've been toying with an idea like this but only for weekend trips < $500 for 1-2 people. I kind of hit a brick wall though, because I couldn't figure out how to automate and monetize it since you can't book flights on behalf of another person and most hotels/airlines don't offer (simple) affiliate programs or decent APIs.
Good work! One bit of feedback - perhaps add a field for the number of people. Two people have to buy two plane tickets but only one hotel room. This affects the price per person quite a bit. Is this factored in at all?
The airport field in the find flights section doesn't recognize lower case airport codes. For example, "ord" doesn't work but "ORD" does. It should probably accept lower case as well.
It was fun to see where I could go on my budget - but it listed my originating city twice. I get that people do "stay-cations" but for adventurous travel, probably not. ;)
Cool app, something I've been looking for. But what I really want is travel destination discovery, for flights (or other modes). I am in Sri Lanka, what are all the flights leaving in approx 2 weeks that I could take, under $200 (one way)
Haven't found an app that really does this well. Tried adioso, sky scanner, kayak, anyone knows something else let me know. Adioso is closest, but I still find I have to be too specific
I love the look and the ease of selecting a destination idea.
When it shows out-of-country options like "Grand Cayman" it routes your flights from your location to "FL" (closest airport to Cayman) and then seems to drop the ball there. The results for skyscanner shows cayman, but I don't see the flight anywhere. It's not a clear UI.
Small thing, you must type the airport identifier in caps ("LAX" vs "lax") if you want it to find it.
Suggestion: take trip duration vs travel time into account. E.g. it makes no sense to suggest a weekend city tour to Perth, Australia for someone from Europe.
Brisbane, 10 days, AUD$3000 hangs Firefox and I had to crash out (50.1.0 x64 EME-free). It doesn't if I drop the price cap down to AUD$1500. It doesn't if I do the same search in Chrome, though the scrollbar becomes very small. Chrome reports that I'm able to search 589 destinations once it's done loading.
I suspect Firefox doesn't handle such a large number of results well.
One odd/sad thing is I put in Portland as the start location and 700 and the budget for 4 nights and it gives me some nice results that include... Portland. Probably safe to say I wouldn't want to stay in the city I'm leaving from.
Nice site though. Works well on mobile, and you're. It spamming me with ads like the other players do.
The page looks awesome, I'll try to use it when deciding my holydays. Quick feedback: It would be awesome to have the option to have Celsius degrees instead of Farenheit. Also, it would be ideal to either a) Specify that the currency is US dollars, or b) select your own currency.
Oh, I found where the option for that is in the page. IMO all the parameters for the filter that are in the home page should be in the search page, so you can change the parameters while searching.
Maybe it's a new addition, but i see a currency selector on the home page (top left). EDIT: Selecting my local currency also changed the temperature to Celsius. Nice.
I dig it this. If I have $2000 and a 4-day weekend coming up, I want you to email me places that my family can go at a certain budget.
I fly out of HSV most often and it is one of the most expensive airports in the US. It seems most of your estimates for me are off by a factor of 2 or 3.
Oh, that could be. We don't take into account specific airports but just calculate an average flightprice. When we tested, most of the time actual flights were cheaper then the average price we stated (but that was tested from Schiphol Airport Amsterdam, since we are from the Netherlands)
Does the duration include travel time? I'm in London and it suggests flying to India and Peru for a 3 day weekend trip.
I'd be nice to see how much time you'd actually have at the destination, given a certain amount of days off, especially for short trips.
Ah that's a good one! For now we don't take it into account since it its also depending on your deprature times (morning / evening) but it would be a nice additional feature!
Very cool! Tried a 4-day search & excited by the results. Looking forward to trying a booking.
There may be a feature to choose a preferred day of week for departure, for example a 4-day trip that departs on Thursday. If not, that would be helpful.
I love the app, great design and nice UX. Definitely going to play around with it and maybe find a cool destination :) Very impressive, even more since you said you learned coding while building it! What did you build it with?
Fantastic tool. How is average price calculated? For instance, there could be a substantial price difference between east coast and west coast locations so I wonder how reliable it would be.
You're using Javascript to alter text colors of your labels when the form input/select element is hovered, but you're using CSS :hover/:focus/:active states to govern background colors of the form fields.
So this means that I can hover one of the select elements, turning its label's text red and its background white; then focus that select element when using it, and then move the mouse cursor away -- the label text remains white, and thus invisible until I focus on something else.
It's a complete waste of Javascript's time to do such trivial things; the timing will be out of sync compared to the heavily optimised CSS transition; and it's just bad coding to have two identical and connected tasks divided such that one is governed by the CSS and the other by jQuery soup. Good luck maintaining that.
Just use CSS to govern the hover states of the labels as well. It should be trivial to set up a transition as you did for the select element.
--------
I've been using the word 'label', but that's not the element you've used, but rather the element you should be using instead of a div and p.
<!-- BAD -->
<div class="duration">
<p>HOLIDAY DURATION</p>
</div>
<!-- GOOD -->
<label class="duration" for="dagen">
<span>HOLIDAY DURATION</span>
</label>
HTML5 has been designed for the provision of semantic meaning, it makes both your code clearer to you later down the line and also makes the site/app more accessible.
Also, your Google Analytics tracking code is the first thing in the document. That's not a great idea -- unless you think a page view should be registered even before the page has been, well, viewed. Most choose to stick the tracking code at the end of the body element, or as the last element of the head element, depending on how honestly they want to report on pageviews. Either way, the first thing that should be read by a browser is a charset declaration (utf-8).
--------
Also, in your CSS you have a bit that looks like this:
* {
overflow: none;
}
There is no such thing, that's just a CSS parser error. You can say overflow: hidden, but I'd be cautious about doing that. Generally speaking, if you have understood the CSS box model correctly, you should not need to govern the overflow of all of your elements like that. If yours is an edge case, where it's necessary to have some overflow, you might want to consider setting overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: auto on html/body elements instead.
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Also, no offence, but that jQuery code is looking pretty smelly. I know you're beginners, and you've accomplished something very cool here, you should be proud, but I can't help but feel as though you've picked an approach to web development that you'll want to unlearn if you are serious about web development.
I'm not talking about using React when I say that -- I tend to work without a framework of any kind, unless I'm working with a team. I'm talking about learning about function composition, and learning about functional programming techniques in general. It will cut your code down to size and make it much easier to navigate and debug.
React just so happens to force a functional approach to webdev, and it's very trendy at the moment, so it might be worth your investing time to study it. Otherwise, Marijn Haverbeke's book 'Eloquent JavaScript' (eloquentjavascript.net) is a good thing to start off with. It doesn't cover jQuery, and I think that's why I always recommend it to anyone wishing to develop for the front-end: the last thing you should learn is jQuery, and then by the time you do come to learn it, you won't need it.
--------
Also, 4 web fonts, 9+ weights? Yikes, bye bye 2G/3G users. Still, if you must destroy people on slower connections, at least combine these as was intended:
That will cut your HTTP requests down a bit, and make for less ugly code. Consider bundling each of your CSS source files together, unless you're counting on HTTP/2 to save the day.
Wow! Thank for your great amount of feedback wanda! Learnt a lot from this :D
Thanks for putting so much work in writing this all, really appreciate it! Will implement these optimizations ASAP!
Our code indeed looks awfull but we just wanted to ship now, since we just finished it and it functioned well enough. We decided to clear it up later (very soon though) so your tips and suggestions are amazing :)
This is really, really good! Prepare for acquisition offers in weeks :D
A feature I'd love to see, which I haven't seen anywhere, is filtering by day of week. I want to search for 3 day holidays that start on a Friday, for example.
We have! But currently temp is related to currency (USD = Fahrenheit, all others are Celsius), that's a little mistake we made. We'll make a separate option for temp.
1. upon loading, the web site immediately asks permissions for sending notifications and access to my location - that's too early and because of that, of course, "No, thanks". Notifications about what? Location - why? Since it's not mobile app and I didn't read the description before installing it, the request should be done only after some explanation of service is provided.
2. False data (and this ruins the whole idea). The trip from Moscow to Iceland is unlikely to cost $500 for two nights/two adults and when your service shows 5500 Rub per night average price for stay, it does not offer any accommodation less than 80KRub per night. Finding the flights at declared price is impossible: there's no UI to specify dates, as requested by error message (and minimal prices cannot be found by search on specific dates anyway).
All that said, it's too early to discuss the result - fix the bugs and UX issues first.