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Keep Track of Corona Travel Restrictions

by Marty

Yesterday, while thinking about going travelling after the corona crisis is over, I came to the following problem: Even when the biggest corona wave is over, there still might be future waves isolated to a specific country/continent. So when planning your travels you always have to keep an eye on various official sources to know whether you can travel e.g. from Europa to US. There are different outcomes:

  • you cannot entry at all
  • you can entry but will be placed under quarantine for X weeks
  • you can entry and no quarantine but have to supply additional information

and so on..

My idea is to consolidate all that information on a single website, so people can easily lookup the travel restriction going from Country A to Country B and be notified when it changes?

Would you use such website? What would be a way to monetize? Simple Ads for travelling? A X€ fee for getting a notification?

Marty's avatarMarty
on March 29, 2020
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  1. 1

    I will be a user of this! Sounds like a good idea.

    A few ideas / comments on monetisation:

    • Limit to x countries for free, then require a payment to see the rest. I expect people to view multiple countries per session if really interested in traveling.
    • Affiliate marketing - travel agencies / hotels / booking.com / airlines..etc.
    • General Google AdSense ads may work at some point but not at the beginning when you barely have any traffic. Since ads may degrade user experience I'd avoid them at the beginning. Also, CPCs or CPM will depend on advertiser competition in the travel vertical, which is very weak now and will only pick up when life is back to "normal".
    • Charging to follow topics sounds interesting. I'm not sure I'd pay though, I'd rather "refresh" the page when I need to check the info rather than wait to be notified of updates. My travel rarely depends on external factors - I usually travel when there is a need to do so, not when a country opens its doors or ticket prices drop.

    I hope this helps!

    indiefoundur's avatar indiefoundur
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Thanks a lot, especially for the input on the monetization part! I am still thinking on how I would gather all the needed data from all the different countries without causing too much work for me...

      Marty's avatar Marty
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      7 years ago
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      1. 1

        If I was to do this myself, I would do the following:

        1. Gather updates manually initially. Setup a process for doing so on a daily basis so that it's as efficient as possible for a couple of weeks at least
        2. Then, depending on demand, hire someone and pay them by the hour to do this on your behalf once you've nailed down your sources and data collection approach.
          2-a) You could potentially have them fill the data in a Google Sheet, which you could then access via the Google Sheets API to populate your static web-pages. They key here is finding a structured manner in which they could send you the data so that it can be easily imported into your website content database with the least amount of manual work required.
        3. In the meantime, work on a crawler/parser that gathers this data for you from the trusted sources that you've monitored for a couple of weeks and know to be reliable and consistent.

        Step #1 is certainly a lot of work, but I don't see a way around it. Investing in a crawler at the beginning is risky because you may want to change your sources after a few days of monitoring, or you may find out that there isn't as much demand as you hoped there would be.

        indiefoundur's avatar indiefoundur
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        7 years ago
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        1. 1

          Yeah, I thought about roughly the same strategy. I have a lot of experience in scraping, but, as you said, can be a pain in the ass to change later on.

          Marty's avatar Marty
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          7 years ago
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  2. 1

    I would agree, I'm actually in need of this.
    And would go with growing and simple ads.

    DailyDevTips's avatar DailyDevTips
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Okay, thanks for your input!

      Marty's avatar Marty
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      7 years ago
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  3. 1

    yes i would use it :), and yes and it seems like ads would indeed be the best way.

    Coneo's avatar Coneo
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Glad to hear that:)

      Marty's avatar Marty
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      7 years ago
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