The consensus on the question I posted before seems to be that it's okay to encourage travel, but that we need to encourage traveling BETTER, whether that means encouraging choosing trains over planes, taking longer trips, seeing things in a different way, etc.
My question now is HOW? How do I as a content creator do that? I mean, just lecturing people about sustainability or whatever isn't going to help. I'd love some PRACTICAL ideas on how to encourage better travel.
So far I'm trying - not always succeeding - to avoid writing about the places that are very popular and instead focusing on lesser-traveled places. I'm avoiding big general listicles and instead trying to write about much narrower topics. As much as possible, I'm traveling by train or bus rather than plane and that'll come through when I write about a place. Any other suggestions?
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Question for those in Travel Tech — do your apps experience some seasonality?
My hypothesis, as a trip planning application, I'm going to see lower usage until about 3-6 months prior to peak travel season.
Unfortunately, Plan Harmony has only really been around since late July 2022 so I don't have a large enough data set to validate this hypothesis. Would love to hear from your experience!
Yes, and you’ve brought up one of the biggest challenges for travel apps. Unlike games and “day to day” apps, travel apps are only used when people travel (or planning to). Investors hate this.
Seasonality also makes building travel communities hard, since the members not traveling are less engaged. Making your travel app or service “sticky” for users at home is hard. You’re mostly going to be relegated to newsletter engagement.
From all studies I’ve seen over the years, time to book is decreasing (more spontaneous trips).
It would also depend on your main user cohorts whether you are affected by seasonality. If you users are nomads / long term travelers, then I wouldn’t anticipate seasonality. However if your users are families, then I’d imagine their seasonality would be around school holidays, etc.
Also factor in southern hemisphere people (like me!) who have a different set of travel “seasons”.
Hope these ideas help!
Very insightful, thanks!
Hi Mike! I have a travel app and our goal is to keep the users engaged everyday of the year! We try to keep the entire process of inspiration, research, planning, booking, and feedback/sharing post trip all within our platform, so we are every part of the user journey. I would encourage looking to focus on bringing them all together in your marketing, newsletters, and integrating other users 'past' experiences from their trips!
Happy to help any way I can!
:)
Sally, NaviSavi