I’ve Been ThereBy

Thomas Hawkes, Aaron Cornish, Joel Lee and Yasith Senanayake

Who? Travellers and Holidaymakers.

What? People that are planning to go on holiday.When? During the planning process of the holiday.

Where? Anywhere with Internet access.Why? To give advice on places to go and things to do as well as

information about the place.

People often don’t have time to plan all areas of the holiday and have to decide where they want to go when they arrive at their

destination, wasting time that could be spent elsewhere.

We are addressing the issue of people who need to plan their holiday but don’t have the time to arrange where they’re going to stay, their flights and other time-consuming tasks. With this on-

the-go app, people can plan their holiday quickly with everything required for a relaxing, stress-free vacation.

There are many different problems that can occur while travelling and during the scheduling/planning process, such as booking

accommodation and having no knowledge of travel routes. Being able to arrange everything beforehand will remove the stress of

getting lost or not knowing where to visit during your stay.

My team, I’ve Been There, is developing a mobile app

to help inexperienced travellers who have little to no knowledge about organising a trip to plan their holidays with efficiency by placing all of the required information and resources into one

easily-accessible app.

We found that new and inexperienced travellers would forget to consider things such as itineraries or budget plans because there

were so many apps or websites that had to be downloaded or visited in order to have everything organised.

There is an app called “Trip Advisor” that allows users to view other users’ reviews on various locations and plan their holidays. However, the reviews are often fake to promote hotels or biased and the app itself has technical issues that do not make it user-

friendly.Our app monitors the credibility of the submitted reviews by

filtering out certain keywords that are used by computer programs. It also deletes identical reviews to prevent spamming. It would also give you the option to connect to social networking so that

close friends can give you trustworthy opinions.

Our app includes features such as being able to pinpoint future destinations and having the option to handle all budgeting and

finances on the app.When we asked other students who had parents that frequently travelled, they all agreed that it was such a hassle to organise everything by going online and having to search for all of the

resources required. The students did say that their parents and themselves would definitely use something that would need

significantly less time and effort to use.

We have designed a wireframe that includes all of the menus and applications that our app will include and we have also added all of the links to each feature, as well as a ‘Contact Us’ button that could lead to a future website or simply some contact details (E-

mail address, phone numbers, etc.)

Our idea does rely heavily on existing content and crowd-sourced data. Our app is not a complex design and requires little to no

protected third-party data, as most of the information needed by the user will have been provided by past users. Users will be able to remain anonymous while leaving reviews to prevent a breach of

privacy.

We intend to have small banner advertisements at the bottom of the screen to create a sustainable source of revenue. We will

make sure that the advertisements do not interfere with the user’s app experience. We may also release a premium version of our

app that removes all advertisements.We do not have any customer pledges as of yet due to our app

still being in development.

To start, we may have volunteers Beta-Test our product and give us some feedback.As we are focusing on introducing our app to the market, we intend to use word-of-mouth to pique interest in our target market. Once interest is generated, we could start to spread to a wider range of audiences by adding our app to other markets, such as the Google Play Store and the AppStore.