My brother and I would like to show you what we have been working on for the past 6 months.
What started out as a little project to learn to code together has become a full-fledged travel tool to discover destinations you wouldn't directly think of.
It's called DESTIGOGO :)
We are curious about what you think and happy to answer any questions you have!
Hello,
I tried looking at an example trip, and when I asked it to show flights it popped up an error saying I needed to input the dates of the flight. There does not seem to be any field to pick the date in, though?
I really want this... but its pretty broken atm.
1) Images are comically wrong. One "whoa" hit for me was "the blue mountains" in Canada, but the photo is from BANF, 3500 KM away and much more expensive. This makes me doubt all of the images, which makes the whole site somewhat useless.
2) Needs current temps instead of average. Current implementation has quirks like sending you to Winnipeg for sun.
3) Can't book/find dates where you can get these prices. So I can't even comment on if they are real and/or use the site for its intended purposes.
4) shouldn't suggest a holiday where I'm coming from.
keep at it though, if this worked as advertised it could be my go to site for booking vacations.
1) I think that's an incident, we've collected all the images by hand - so the error rate should be very low. Apparently we made a mistake for the blue mountains, canada - so thanks for mentioning :)
2) True, we'll implement current temps very soon :)
3) Working on that, for now you need to select an airport from the dropdown list to ensure that the dates become visible.
4) Sure, we'll fix that.
Thank your for your feedback yaur. That would be awesome :)
I love the look and the ease of selecting a destination idea.
When it shows out-of-country options like "Grand Cayman" it routes your flights from your location to "FL" (closest airport to Cayman) and then seems to drop the ball there. The results for skyscanner shows cayman, but I don't see the flight anywhere. It's not a clear UI.
Small thing, you must type the airport identifier in caps ("LAX" vs "lax") if you want it to find it.
Does the duration include travel time? I'm in London and it suggests flying to India and Peru for a 3 day weekend trip.
I'd be nice to see how much time you'd actually have at the destination, given a certain amount of days off, especially for short trips.
Ah that's a good one! For now we don't take it into account since it its also depending on your deprature times (morning / evening) but it would be a nice additional feature!
Really cool tool. I was thinking about a similar project since a while, you built it, please keep it going!
Small side note, I'm not sure if it's because of the mobile version but I find it would be great to have some more details about the exact way you've found to go there (for example, when it shows the car are transportation way, how does it get this price? Is it oil price or also tolls or shared car or public transport? Didn't see any details about these).
Also，it would be great to have details about which border to cross (if any) and give some visa information according to the nationality - these info are hard to get as always changing, but it could be a real strength of this project if you could give them - as no one else really does it well.
Last cool feature, crossing the data with numbeo or nomadlist to get the cost of life in cities - and similar kind of cool stuff. That would be amazing!
Some great additional options you mention there. For now, we have chosen to take averages for most of things to keep things simple and don't have the user to think about every detail. Besides, these variables differ heavily (oil prices per country differ, fuel consumption per car too, etc.)
Visa information is a think we have planned to add very soon :) Also more additional information like that we are planning to implement soon :D
Don't assume that everyone owns a car. Especially people who are looking for cheap trips might not have one or prefer travelling by train (which works well in western europe).
I dig it this. If I have $2000 and a 4-day weekend coming up, I want you to email me places that my family can go at a certain budget.
I fly out of HSV most often and it is one of the most expensive airports in the US. It seems most of your estimates for me are off by a factor of 2 or 3.
Oh, that could be. We don't take into account specific airports but just calculate an average flightprice. When we tested, most of the time actual flights were cheaper then the average price we stated (but that was tested from Schiphol Airport Amsterdam, since we are from the Netherlands)
Can you suggest (genuinely interested) something similar that isn't a) bloated with ads b) clearly affiliated with an airline/travel agent or c) is budget driven (high or low) - not "cheap airfare" or "cheap accom" driven? I've looked before and am yet to find something good...
I think Tripnary is doing a great job at it, though probably failing because it's a hard business to start with (they haven't updated their app since last year)
This is awesome - always wanted something like this! Nice design and UX :)
A couple of small suggestions.
If I set my budget your app "fills" it leaving no room for food/in-country travel/etc. Maybe you could had a measure of how much people want to spend on such things - perhaps as a percentage but presented as fixed options (I eat out a lot, I visit attractions a lot)? Or make it more obvious somehow that this is the "bare cost" of getting to and staying somewhere.
Perhaps consider only rendering the first page or two of results - then load more in as I scroll. On my 2015 MBP it hangs a little when loading in all the tiles (in Firefox and Chrome).
Thanks for your suggestions! Since it is always questionable how much someone would spend (and very depending on the person itself) we didn't take into account cost of living. My brother and I had a few discussions about this since I wanted to show 'the whole package', but he convinced me to keep just keep it simple and add additional 'cost of living' info later on, at the destination page. For now I still agree with, he has some good points. Although it differs from person to person what is preferred.
Loading in results on page scroll should be really neat. I think it will speed up loading time tremendously, definately going to look into that!
- As I've entered my area, it would be useful if the "from airport" on the result page would default to "area airports"
- I'd like a map view of the destinations
- I'd like to be able to filter the lodging accommodations based on stars and type (personal home, BnB, hotel) as there are some regions in the world that I've learned to only use hotels when it's sight-unseen and without recommendation
I'm normally a huge map fan, but I actually like it the way it is, without a map. I had this cool moment where I thought, "It doesn't matter where in the world it is, as long as it is under your budget."
I haven't figured out how to pass all the menus after clicking a destination. I typed in an airport and clicked Search Flights, but it complains that I haven't entered dates. Can't find a place to enter them.
Really attractive design. One thing that was a bit annoying on mobile was that there was several prompts all at once. (location, add to home, etc.) Location prompt makes sense, but you may want to save the add to home prompt for a little bit later.
I see that you're using Booking & Skyscanner, so maybe it's one of those, but where do the beautiful destination images come from?
Thanks a lot! :) I get your point, it really is a bit annoying. Fortunately these are only shown once haha.
Yes that's true, but we are only using them for flights and hotels.
The images come from Shutterstock. Firstly we hand curated 650+ destinations, then we hand picked all the images and bought them at shutterstock :') They are all beautiful, but it was a real pain in the ass selecting them haha. We did like 50 pics in 3 hours..
Best practice is to not ask for permissions upon first page load - too many people will leave immediately.
Instead, ask for them when they are relevant - for location, maybe once they click the "From" box.
For notifications, build your own in-app message explaining why the user wants notifications. If they "Accept" your own box, show them the actual notification request.
Many people, especially HN users, will have ill-will against a site that immediately wants to send pop-ups to their browsers. It feels too much like spam, trying to catch unaware users. If you explain why first, it's less intrusive.
So found an issues, for places that don't have flights it never pops up the dates. Then when I click "Search Flights", I get a validation error for not selecting dates.
Pulling my hair I finally found a destination that had flights and the date selector displayed correctly.
Fantastic tool. How is average price calculated? For instance, there could be a substantial price difference between east coast and west coast locations so I wonder how reliable it would be.
Cool idea. A few issues: 1.) The flight section of the /destinations/ page asks me to select a departure and return date, but lacks the field to do that. It also needlessly asks for my home airport again. 2.) The exclude regions function seems to think that Turkey is in Europe. 3.) Finland, Georgia, Russia, Poland, Canada, Colorado, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Utah are not "sunny" destinations in January.
Asking for airport may make sense, when there are 3 or 4 airports nearby (e.g. Moscow SVO,DME,VKO and ZIA). But that's a big question, why only travel by air considered (it's quite common and convenient to take night sleeper cars in Russia or Shinkansen in Japan).
As future improvement, it will also make sense to consider visa money/time costs (maintain matrix of visa-free destinations/visa costs/issue times) or at least add a note in UI that valid visa may be required to some destinations.
Thanks for mentioning! That's already on our list and we will implement soon, in addition we are planning to add a safety score or safety index - which is quite relevant at the moment..
Thank you! Thanks for all your feedback! 1) We need to fix the issue of not showing date-input-fields before a proper airport is selected. 2) Ah that's true - I guess the west part of Turkey is in Europe (note: not EU) whereas the bigger eastern part indeed is in Asia. 3) True, haha, temperatures are yearly averages at this moment. Will be current temperatures in the near future :)
172 comments
[ 186 ms ] story [ 5010 ms ] threadMy brother and I would like to show you what we have been working on for the past 6 months.
What started out as a little project to learn to code together has become a full-fledged travel tool to discover destinations you wouldn't directly think of.
It's called DESTIGOGO :)
We are curious about what you think and happy to answer any questions you have!
2) Needs current temps instead of average. Current implementation has quirks like sending you to Winnipeg for sun.
3) Can't book/find dates where you can get these prices. So I can't even comment on if they are real and/or use the site for its intended purposes.
4) shouldn't suggest a holiday where I'm coming from.
keep at it though, if this worked as advertised it could be my go to site for booking vacations.
1) I think that's an incident, we've collected all the images by hand - so the error rate should be very low. Apparently we made a mistake for the blue mountains, canada - so thanks for mentioning :)
2) True, we'll implement current temps very soon :)
3) Working on that, for now you need to select an airport from the dropdown list to ensure that the dates become visible.
4) Sure, we'll fix that.
Thank your for your feedback yaur. That would be awesome :)
Edit to add: I love the design, and I love the idea. Keep adding to it!
Thanks a lot! :)
When it shows out-of-country options like "Grand Cayman" it routes your flights from your location to "FL" (closest airport to Cayman) and then seems to drop the ball there. The results for skyscanner shows cayman, but I don't see the flight anywhere. It's not a clear UI.
Small thing, you must type the airport identifier in caps ("LAX" vs "lax") if you want it to find it.
Ah that could be, we couldn't test all scenarios but for some destinations we indeed need to fine tune.
Thanks for mentioning, we'll fix that :D
Does the duration include travel time? I'm in London and it suggests flying to India and Peru for a 3 day weekend trip. I'd be nice to see how much time you'd actually have at the destination, given a certain amount of days off, especially for short trips.
Some great additional options you mention there. For now, we have chosen to take averages for most of things to keep things simple and don't have the user to think about every detail. Besides, these variables differ heavily (oil prices per country differ, fuel consumption per car too, etc.)
Visa information is a think we have planned to add very soon :) Also more additional information like that we are planning to implement soon :D
I fly out of HSV most often and it is one of the most expensive airports in the US. It seems most of your estimates for me are off by a factor of 2 or 3.
So my question is: how will you differentiate yourself from the other 1000 budget trip planning tool other than a better interface?
Also how will you acquire your users? Travel startups are on of the hardest to acquire users, merely because it's so expensive
A couple of small suggestions.
If I set my budget your app "fills" it leaving no room for food/in-country travel/etc. Maybe you could had a measure of how much people want to spend on such things - perhaps as a percentage but presented as fixed options (I eat out a lot, I visit attractions a lot)? Or make it more obvious somehow that this is the "bare cost" of getting to and staying somewhere.
Perhaps consider only rendering the first page or two of results - then load more in as I scroll. On my 2015 MBP it hangs a little when loading in all the tiles (in Firefox and Chrome).
Thanks for your suggestions! Since it is always questionable how much someone would spend (and very depending on the person itself) we didn't take into account cost of living. My brother and I had a few discussions about this since I wanted to show 'the whole package', but he convinced me to keep just keep it simple and add additional 'cost of living' info later on, at the destination page. For now I still agree with, he has some good points. Although it differs from person to person what is preferred.
Loading in results on page scroll should be really neat. I think it will speed up loading time tremendously, definately going to look into that!
- There's a slight CSS issue on buttons not clearing text: http://imgur.com/a/FVvj8
- As I've entered my area, it would be useful if the "from airport" on the result page would default to "area airports"
- I'd like a map view of the destinations
- I'd like to be able to filter the lodging accommodations based on stars and type (personal home, BnB, hotel) as there are some regions in the world that I've learned to only use hotels when it's sight-unseen and without recommendation
Congrats again!
I'm normally a huge map fan, but I actually like it the way it is, without a map. I had this cool moment where I thought, "It doesn't matter where in the world it is, as long as it is under your budget."
I haven't figured out how to pass all the menus after clicking a destination. I typed in an airport and clicked Search Flights, but it complains that I haven't entered dates. Can't find a place to enter them.
If you type your airport or place where you want to fly from and select an option out the suggestion dropdown you should be able to select the dates!
Thanks for the feedback, we will solve this!
- Have you tried pushing the more info button? When you do, it wil scroll down.
- Ah yeah, do you mean showing a list of nearby airports? We are working on that one :)
- Allright, i'll write that down!
- True, that would add a lot of value in terms of UX. We have that planned for the near future.
Thank you for your feedback!
Either a list of nearby airports or do metropolitan radius (e.g. NYC means LGA, JFK, sometimes Newark).
And no worries. Launching is a big win.
We are planning to work that out soon :)
Thanks a lot for your feedback mjolk.
I see that you're using Booking & Skyscanner, so maybe it's one of those, but where do the beautiful destination images come from?
Yes that's true, but we are only using them for flights and hotels.
The images come from Shutterstock. Firstly we hand curated 650+ destinations, then we hand picked all the images and bought them at shutterstock :') They are all beautiful, but it was a real pain in the ass selecting them haha. We did like 50 pics in 3 hours..
Instead, ask for them when they are relevant - for location, maybe once they click the "From" box.
For notifications, build your own in-app message explaining why the user wants notifications. If they "Accept" your own box, show them the actual notification request.
Many people, especially HN users, will have ill-will against a site that immediately wants to send pop-ups to their browsers. It feels too much like spam, trying to catch unaware users. If you explain why first, it's less intrusive.
Pulling my hair I finally found a destination that had flights and the date selector displayed correctly.
Also, video on about page seems rather slow.
One request though, temperatures in °C, Fahrenheit is pretty much meaningless to me.
Yes true, we are from the Netherlands so also want to have temperatures as °C.
We made a little mistake by relating Fahrenheit to currency (USD). We'll fix that :)
May I ask where you're from?
Edit: added a few destinations to #3