Someone else also commented on the "$$$" and suggested the use of labels instead. Would you find labels like "budget", "luxury", "family friendly," more useful?
Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll do my best to address them.
> I feel like this is a platform for exploiting free labor more than a useful tool to help plan traveling. I do not feel "open source" spirit.
- There’s actually a profit-sharing program that I'm experimenting with. Basically if a trip you create makes money you share in the revenue. The site isn’t actually making any money right now so the details of this is still being worked out.
> I generally don't believe you are an avid traveler building a platform to make your life easier.
- I built this site because I am not an avid traveler, but someone who wants to travel a lot more. And as someone who doesn’t know all the best places to visit or eat or things I need to do and etc, I thought it’d be great to have place where all that knowledge is prepared for you, perhaps by local experts, in the form on an itinerary. Basically just trying to make traveling a lot simpler and maybe even more exciting.
> This site says it is community based, but I am not sure where that community comes from. For it to be community based I would expect a member of an already existing community to build something for that community, rather than something being built in hopes of creating a community.
- Not sure if that’s a bad thing. I don’t think a community like this exists and I think it’d be great if it did.
> This site is absolutely worse than just showing up at the best rated hostel in a city and having the hostel workers tell you what to do. The expensive hotel suggestions rather than budget hotel and hostel suggestions is clear evidence, imho, of the corruptive power of affiliate marketing and industry first rather than traveler first thinking.
- Anyone can create a trip and suggest any hotel they wish. I would love it if the hostel worker you are referring to created and shared a trip on the platform, then everyone would get access to this much better trip that you are speaking of.
- The links in the descriptions of the current trips available aren’t tied to any affiliate marketing links.
I think most of the other stuff you pointed out are UI and implementation suggestions. Thank you for those, I’ve added them to a list of things to do.
> - There’s actually a profit-sharing program that I'm experimenting with. Basically if a trip you create makes money you share in the revenue. The site isn’t actually making any money right now so the details of this is still being worked out.
I would consider writing your mission more clearly on your about us. Right now I feel like you have the standard mission that is rotting America: make money
Additionally all of the "we" turns me off, because I don't think it's true. You are hoping to build a platform for community. Once you build a community you can change it to "we", but right now I don't think "we" stuff is a good choice. I think if you showed that to the ghost of Steve Jobs, he'd have yelled you out of his office. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28826437 -- worth googling for the whole thread if you don't use twitter)
If community is central to your goal, then I think you've taken a wrong approach because monetization/transactionality is an anathema to community.
> Our mission is to make traveling simple by taking the planning out of vacation planning so that you can focus on what matters the most, the experience.
What you learn from traveling pretty quickly is that the experience barely matters at all and it's the people you share experiences with that mean everything. Good people make bad experiences a great story. No people makes many experiences largely forgettable. You haven't truly felt alone until you've seen/done something really cool and worth sharing alone, and then when you get back, you realize that no one really cares about your experiences other than if they should do it themselves.
> I built this site because I am not an avid traveler, but someone who wants to travel a lot more. And as someone who doesn’t know all the best places to visit or eat or things I need to do and etc, I thought it’d be great to have place where all that knowledge is prepared for you, perhaps by local experts, in the form on an itinerary. Basically just trying to make traveling a lot simpler and maybe even more exciting.
Optimization is the enemy of just doing it, and I wholeheartedly recommend just doing it. I've had great experiences literally just walking around, that goes triple if food is a big deal to you.
Here's what I recommend before you continue all this: Pick two cities you want to visit.
Go to hostelworld and find 2 or 3 hostels in those cities with a high rating (≥ 9.0) and a large number of reviews (I recommend against American cities, America's tourism culture is hot garbage). Look at the pictures of the hostels and make sure they have a common room, generally with a communal table and couches, potentially a pool table or darts, etc. Higher capacity hostels are usually better. Your goal here is less the tourism and more to understand hostels.
Book a week, and move to each of the different 2-3 hostels over that week. When you check in ask the front desk what there is to do and eat. If the hostel is a bust, try more conventional means of finding activities/food. In the morning, eat what the hostel offers in the common room or go to a nearby convenience store/street food and eat it in the hostel common room around others. Your goal is to overhear other people talking and invite yourself into their conversations and/or directly invite people to eat with you etc. I think you fancy yourself an entrepreneur and if you do, this is a great exercise regardless of the travel.
It is totally common and acceptable to pull out your laptop in the common room and work on your website.
I think that experience is very important to informing you about travel, community, and how sane people (solo) travel vs whatever it is that Americans do.
hostelworld, rome2rio, and couchsurfing are generally great apps. Couchsurfing had (maybe has?) a hangout feature that was fantastic. Culture trip frequently had the best curated travel content, atlas/gastro obsucra were also not bad.
Thanks! I think I understand where you are coming from. There’s a balance between corporate BS and authenticity, and right now the overall impression you are getting is more weighted towards corporate BS. I built a lot of projects and this is the one is probably the one I was most excited to build. I do travel (probably done more of the “American hot garbage variation of it.”), but I want to travel a lot more. One thing that really excited me about the idea of “open sourcing itineraries” is that it could surface more kinds of trips than your standard cookie cutter ones. It’s an experiment and I appreciate your feedback on this. Thank you.
Hi, open-source is in reference to the travel itineraries. People can post travel itineraries and other people can modify them to make them their own and re-share them.
Right, but that's not what "open source" means. Open source refers specifically to the code of the service being licensed under an OSI-approved license.
Thanks for the suggestions! I like them and added them to my todo list. Someone else also mentioned they'd like to be able to click outside to close the itinerary.
