Sunday, September 11, 2011

IST195 Entrepreneurial Idea

Traveling itself can be a pain in the butt, let alone planning for a trip. Whenever we work on our own traveling itinerary, there are always things that we miss out. The idea that I have is a system that aids and eases the planning and traveling process.

Planning a trip through your travel agent can be annoying. Traveling to the travel agency requires traveling time and most people prefer to do their booking over the phone. Yet it is difficult to be on the same page with your travel agent and to pass on details through the phone over the phone. Other than booking your trip via your travel agent, there are also online travel agencies. Big online travel agency websites like Expedia and Orbitz always throw random links at you whenever you look up plane rides and hotel room vacancies. Rarely are you able to settle on your planning and booking on just one website. 

Most of the time, our traveling doesn't exactly go along with our itinerary. We are unable to find where to checkin, how much time we have to transit, where our transit gate, where we pick up our baggage is and the like. All these can take up time and delay us from our plan. Sometimes we wish we had a "GPS" that tells us what to do and where to go.

I want to build a system that is able to consolidate all the travel planning and travel itinerary all in one go. The system gives you a template and it enables you to makes all your bookings - bus tickets, ferry tickets, plane tickets, hotel bookings, car rental for example, on it. This template forms your itinerary. The itinerary includes directions on where to go, how to get there, as well as things you need to do. For example, someone needs to transit flights. The system will tell you where to clear customs, where you should pick up your baggage as well as where your transit gates is. This itinerary can be printed out or used on mobile devices.

6 comments:

  1. This is a pretty big undertaking that would definitely put the remaining travel agents pretty much out of business. I have heard from people traveling that it is hard when using different methods for travel to keep them all straight. It would be cool if after they have booked all of the travel and staying arrangements if the person could download it to their phone and have a step by step guide about where they are going at all times. With a system like this, you could even offer a higher cost solution where a customer could talk to an agent that works for you to do the best booking. So it is either a do it your self, or get help from a pro that if you run into problems as you travel they would be there as someone you could call for help. Great idea.

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  2. It is such a good idea to build a system to help people to schedule travelling. You point out all the problems people met on traveling and then come up with such an idea to deal with problem. If customers satisfy with the service from your traveling system, I believe you are potential to monopolize this industry.

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  3. I've never really liked traveling because of all of the difficulties and annoyances that you mentioned when trying to schedule things. If this website ever came into existence, I would use a lot and would make traveling a whole lot easier. Also, I think your template idea makes a lot of sense and makes things really clear about what tasks need to be accomplished when trying to travel.

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  4. Hello Justin Law,

    This idea sounds great! While I love traveling, going to international airports that I am unfamiliar with are difficult to navigate. Having the step by step direction access would be a great way to avoid the extra hassle in traveling in foreign lands. Having this application as a app on your phone that you can customize to your language would be a great success.

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  5. This is definitely a great product and don't know why anyone else had thought of it before. Planning the trip itself is a pain, but remembering everything you planned and making sure you didn't forget anything, like a ticket, is another thing. Having all of your plans at the tips of your fingers would be incredibly helpful. Also, the ability to go paperless by having all of your tickets on a phone app would make it much easier to hold on to things. As technology advances more, this product could advance with it and become very successful. Again, great idea and thanks for sharing.

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  6. This is a great idea that has the potential to become popular. It has all the tools to become the number one traveling life-saver worldwide. Since we all know that Apps had their way of coming into out lives and making it easier to complete tasks and procrastinate from certain tasks, they have become apart of out social life and now it is time to integrate Apps into our personal lives. This App has its huge job in contacting many different sources of travel itinerary agencies and booking several different things in a certain day, all by itself. It would have to include some sort of personality quiz for the traveller or the family that is traveling. It can't just reserve seats at any old restaurant without knowing what food the traveler likes.

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