Travel industry is centered around attractions for which tourists come to a destination. Transportation industry helps people reach the destination, hospitality industry provides a temporary parking place but it is the attractions that bring people to the destination. Some destinations are natural – like mountains, beaches, rivers or deserts while others are man made – museums, performances, religious places, old heritage sites etc.
Most man made and some natural attractions follow a time table – as in they are open for certain times and closed at others. Most museums are open during the day time and are usually closed once a week – the day differs from place to place. Some attractions may also close during certain times of the year like national parks. Quite a lot of tourists spend a lot of time and money on reaching the destination to realize that the attraction they came for is closed.
A small mobile application / website with simple listing of all the attractions and their open and close timings and any special requirements like dress code or special rules can be listed. A simple search and display should help the user do micro-planning of their trip. Some additional information can be added like
- Any special notices of disruption of regular services can be provides e.g. if some attraction is under renovation and not open for a period or a natural attraction that is cut off because of things like landslides
- Ticket prices wherever applicable can be displayed
- Best time to visit
- Any objective information that helps people plan their visits better
Key success factor for this application would be authenticated and dependable data. Data collection will have to be done personally or sourced from credible sources. May be a date stamp on the date the data was updated would help users cross check if the data is dated.
Since this is a content based business, the revenue model would come from advertising. Hyper local reach of the model should make it very viable for the players of tourism industry. For example someone checking out attractions in South Delhi may be interested in a link like this: Book hotels in Gurgaon at Thinkhotels.com and may get the best reach for their marketing money spent. Similarly local taxi service providers, restaurants and other service providers would be interested in reaching out to potential customers who are about to visit in the vicinity.
The model is very similar to what Zomato does for food, though it would have to be adopted for this vertical niche. If a user generated layer can be added or not – needs to be thought through or rather experimented with but what one can definitely do is let users point out any anomalies in the data that you have posted.
I would love to see this in action – and I promise to be the first user of this app, if you build it.
