Any kind soul that can test a web app? Extreme travel/activity travel for local organizers.
Check it out here: www.trips.community
Some background: I've been around the alps for years working partly as a consultant for an adventure hotel down there. For anyone that doesn't know this yet, for a local organizer or guide to market their trip with an agency or a platform, their fees will span around 15%-50% of each guest. I.e. if a guest book via their platform the guide/organizer will pay the platform around 20% of that revenue (see explore-share as an example or for hiking trips there are a few bigger organizers that will let hotels and guides market their trips for around a 40% cut). They can find quite a lot of guests this way but it is a huge amount, so the price users get is more than it necessarily needs to be. I'm helping one hotel market their trips that will be an all inclusive hiking trip in the Alps from €650 for 6 days whereas the bigger agencies can take up to €3,000 for something similar. The bigger organizers or trips via these platforms often prevail obviously, as they'll know their way around technology (or have the money to hire people who do).
I started sketching on this platform (as well as an open API) for organizers and the ones I knew of, to create an index or a search for travelers. I'm still hunting down more organizers, especially local ones. I want the really good ones that usually aren't visible via Google as they rank pretty low. I do vet them though.
It's just an MVP so far, and I'm still just having fun with it. I'm also partnering with hotels and organizers to create some kind of spread helping them out digitally as I go along. I would be super appreciative if you had a minute or two to test it and let me know your thoughts. The idea is for local/smaller organizers to be able to spread their trips for free here eventually, so there isn't a lot of money in it. Then it's good for travelers that are new to mountaineering, hiking or want to join a trip as a solo traveler. Although, I do hope I can be creative with it later on. The tech is not expensive right now so there's no overhead.
Check it out here www.trips.community (I know - it has the same name as a Web3 company which I later figured out).
Nice website there.
I run hikes and cultural tours, and mainly use Meetup and Facebook to market my tours.
What you have built is like a marketplace for organizers to highlight their tours.
Any other features in your roadmap?
Thank you!
Ah yes! Interesting. There are obviously ways for you to market your tours but it would be expensive and you'd have to give up 20-50% of your total revenue to these platforms. Also, they aren't super great either. The idea is pretty simple so far, to make it more accessible, via the API and then this platform. So far, the organizers need their own page of some sort though to link to.
As for features, I'm pretty bootstrapped so can't give it my sole focus yet but still just building it out fixing the SEO behind it, and then trying to work on the UX. I have a few connections in the alps I'm working, hotels and travel agencies. The API needs to get documented as well. Then there's the work of trying to find more local and specialized guides/organizers that have unique stuff I can get on there.
Any chance you have any feedback on what you'd prefer as an organizer or even as a traveler? Would be great to hear it.
The page is looking cool and great ! @idasilver
But I did not get any response on clicking the "API" link over the top right of the page.
And one more thing I feel is that the page could use a title, something like in the header section.
Great to hear!
Yes I know, I haven't documented the API yet but I need to do that. It just has a comprehensive search query system I have to properly document so people can use it.
The title thing I'm unsure about but yes your are correct lots of people have mentioned this before. Will work something out!
Any other issues you encountered and something you felt that was missing?
Apart from that , it is the same related to API fetch. Filters give errors, other than that I felt it was cool, good looking.
Ah yes the filters will return errors if there aren't any results. Need to find more organizers/guides or perhaps I have too many options to filter with.
Thanks for testing it out and let me know if there is anything else!
Sure.