A few months back I was planning my vacation and things weren’t as easy as I thought. I had figured out the destination, booked air tickets, short-listed places to see and hired a car. The challenge however was to set up a local itinerary. I had X places to cover in Y days with optimized routes so we weren’t spending all our time travelling.  This required finding exact locations & distances between them so as to figure how much could be covered in available time. I had nothing at my disposal but Google Maps & notepad.

Based on my own needs, and the way I go about planning my vacation, here are some high-level ‘market needs’:

• Itinerary Planer: Create, visualize & execute itineraries on interactive maps & calendar
• Vacation Content: Genuine holiday suggestions, based on demographics, with verified itineraries[
• Marketplace: Get quotes from interested agents on my itinerary
• Integration: Link with booking, review, customer engagement & social media platforms

Am I working on this project? Nope. But what do you think of the idea?

After going through all the pain, I noticed there were quite a few open questions on Quora and felt I had an answer. I detailed out an entire user story and added a snapshot of the Google map I created for my own vacation (see below). That got me quite a lot of credits (that ended up being spent to make a random person’s random answer promoted to 100 people, in error). I ended up getting in touch with someone working on a similar project, and getting a chance to validate their idea.

Check out the next post: feature ideas for a vacation planner app that details out the market needs. Feel free to implement 🙂