Almoust two weeks ago our team had an opportunity to take part in one of the biggest IT conferences in the world - WebSummit. Event itself turned out to be not as good as it was advertised but that is not relevant now. What is important that due to tremendous queues to lecture halls we had a chance to walk around all teh startups exhibitng there and now we decided to give you a short summary of the most interesting ones...
First thing we discovered is the fact that majority of applicatios were consumer products. Not so many strictly B2B solutions. I was thinking about the best way to present those apps and i thought categorising them is the way to go. Order is accidental.
1. Private jets
Iteresting type of app - I had no idea that such products exist. They solve a typical first-world problem - how to get from A to B using private jet:)
2. Applications for people with disabilities
Pesrsonally I find them very interesting - they let the disabled to travel more easily.
- Brettaproved it lets you book hotels/restaurants/venues that are accessible for the disabled.
- Handiscover this app focuses only on accomodation - kinda like AirBnB.
3. Travel safe
I found two applications that let you travel more safely that were interesting:
- Sitata Place to look for bad opinions about places or just find some crucial information (hospitals, pharmacies, etc) in a given region.
- StrandD India based (for now) road assistance app.
4. Transportation
There were lots of apps helping in transportation (people as well as cargo), I will show you three that caught my attention:
- Seatsplanet typical carpooling, supposedly it is helpful in organising eeveryday commute.
- Jugnoo Simple, beautiful - uber for rickshaw
- BimBimBikes Website that lets you rent a bike in different cities.
5. Meeting fellow-travellers
Many companies decided to help travellers meet people going in the same direction at the same time.
- karry You only need to put when and where to go and the app lets us find other people that we can connect and travel with.
- Muzenly Global community for music lovers - but those who travel. For me, as a festivals lovers one of the most interesting projects.
- amvigo Here we can add our trips, share opinions and meet other co-travelers.
- Wanderlust Similar to amvigo and karry, but as I understood from my short discussion with the owners, the process is gamified and they also created this whole "tribe" philosophy.
6. Concierge:
We also found few apps that help delivering concierge services
- MeetnGreetMe connects people who want to providing concierge services with travellers. Payments are build in the system.
- B-Guest allows hotels to provide concierge services for they guests. Everything is being ordered in a convenient app (smartWatch too!)
7. Tour planning:
The biggest groups were startups that allow you to plan your perfect journey.
- TravelCat consists of itineraries added by the community. We put where and when, describe our needs using some options and instead we receive list of perfectly fitted itineraries.
- Younderbound a place where you can find short trips - it is interesting because the trips are meant to be created by locales who are passionate about their neighberhood.
- TripVerse a bit similar to TravelCat - itineraries added by the users that can be searched by giving your personal preferences.
- FlyBreak planning your trip according to budget - you only specify where, when and how much you'd like to spend and system shows us perfect tours.
- HelloGbye Siri for travellers - you just say to the app what you want to see, and it does the magic:) You might say its a kind of concierge service too.
- TravelFrog find itineraries added by other users.
8. Connect travellers with local people and companies.
Last, but also large group consists of apps that allow you to know the truly local life better.
- Tudoku application that lets you search for local private tours organised by professional guides. Easy and convenient.
- Gaybrhood LGBT tourism? Interesting.
- Fripito My personal favourite - travel app for photographers. You can find routes and places where you should go to take the perfect shot.
- Gypsy Circle know exactly when your friends are coming to town. Also tell them when you will visit their hometowns:)
- GuideBase Easy search mechanism to look for ski instructors.
- Dharma Locals connects local companies (verified) and activities with tourists.
- lingoguides lets you find professional tour-guides in a given town.
As you can see the tourism-realted apps market is a place where a lot of interesting products appear. My opinion is that the most interesting apps are the ones that try to bring closer the culture of a visited country by getting in touch with locale companies and people - as they know a lot about their cities and can show us really interesting places:) I definitely recommend checking out the list, as there are some reale treasures.
