Mistakes You’re Making When Developing a Travel App

Any business that you intend to start today should be accompanied by an app in the market. Apps are the key ingredients that make your business successful. Depending on the niche of your business and the problem you are about to solve with your venture, an app could be the primary source of conflict-resolution or it could be a key element that helps you maintain a rapport with your customers.

Regardless of the purpose, an app is inevitable for all forms of businesses today, especially travel and tourism. This is the age of digital and data-driven traveling, where people want to make informed decisions from deciding on which destination they would visit and when to booking flight tickets and accommodations.

In a lot of cases, a travel app or a travel software solution becomes the primary source of contact between a travel agent/provider and the traveler, where tickets, travel details, visa updates, and more are sent to the app for easy retrieval and presentation.

So, if you have a travel business, it’s high time you roll out a travel management software or an app for your business. And if you already have one, it’s time to make it more airtight. This is because 29% of the users abandon their travel apps once their purpose with the app is accomplished.

This means travel apps are still being seen as a one-time affair where they are not being preferred after a vacation or travel. But every time your app is being abandoned, there is a likelihood of your users choosing a competitor over yours. And for your business to sustain – especially in these testing times – you don’t want that to happen.

That’s why we felt it was important from our side to offer you concrete reasons why you should have a solid travel app for your business that not only allows you to acquire new customers but help retain your existing ones, too.

So, here are some of the most prominent travel app development mistakes you should avoid to boost your business.

Travel App Mistakes You Should Stop Making Today

1. Not Deciding On a Travel Niche

Travel is a very generic term that comprises diverse travel-related services and products. When you intend to roll out a travel app, you must have a very specific idea or a purpose in mind for your application. It could be to set up a dedicated platform for flight bookings, hotel bookings, local services listings and more. Or, it could be one extensive travel app that allows a user to perform end-to-end planning and booking through your app.

No matter what you choose, your app needs to have a purpose and an appropriate business model to keep your business afloat. Failing to have one will not only make your users confused but your developers to churn out a stable product that solves a concern as well.

2. Inadequate Competitor Research

Often, aspiring entrepreneurs get driven away by their idea that they fail to look at anything outside their bubble and acknowledge their existence. The solution you have in mind could already be existing in the market but you wouldn’t be aware of it. Perhaps there are businesses that have a basic version of your idea implemented in their services or apps but are just not effective enough to make it big in the market.

The probabilities with your idea are infinite and the only way you could be sure about the uniqueness of your idea is by doing airtight market research about your idea and the niche of your business.

You should get into the field and look for the following aspects:

• If your idea already exists in the market
• If your idea is being implemented in the way you visualize
• If yes, does it solve the problem it sets out to resolve?
• If people are getting value for the time and money they spend on the tangible version of your idea
• The general reviews about your competitors and their services
• What would make you stand out from the clutter and do you have it
• Why should people bother about another travel app in the market and more

Answers to these will give you insights on your market and its expectations around your travel app. Your travel app development can then be based on the inputs you receive from the real-world exposure of your idea.

3. Idea Validation

Another layer attached to the market research (or rather the next step to it) is idea validation. So, you’ve done your market research and are pretty much convinced that your app has a place in it. To estimate for how long, you need to roll out an MVP for your product.

A lot of high-budget ambitions and ideas have been colossal failures because they weren’t validated in the first place. So, the first step in making sure your travel app is not a failure is to validate the effectiveness of it in the market.

The most ideal way to do this is to launch an MVP with all the basic and primary features of your app and getting it reviewed in real-time from your first and second circle of contacts or from real users. They would let you know how effective your idea/app is and if they would download it from app stores into their phones. Not launching an MVP is like taking a leap of faith, which is again a gamble.

4. Working With Wrong Developers

The development team you work with influences the quality of your app. Travel apps are all about paying attention to the most minute of the details that could cause concern to a traveler somewhere in the other part of the world. It is all about eliminating those concerns. So, your travel app developers should have the right blend of experience and expertise to anticipate such instances and develop your travel app apart from the knowledge of technicalities involved in the app development.

An ideal travel app development company will take in your idea, assimilate and offer you industry-standard insights on how you could make it better and more practical. They would also recommend you if getting a hybrid or a native app is better based on your app.

But when you work with the wrong team, you would receive a bland and stale app that hardly solves any purpose despite being stable and secure.

5. Not Going Multilingual

You might be one of the most localized tours or travel operators in your region and you have leads and visitors coming in from different parts of the world. They want to approach you for your services when they visit your region. But unfortunately, you notice that your visitors hardly convert despite your expertise being the most recommended in the market.

The aspect you are completely overlooking is your app not supporting multiple languages. When you have an app that is available globally, it should also support several popular and official languages. When users who are unfamiliar with your language download and use your app, they find no purpose or value and immediately uninstall your app no matter how useful it is.

So, the factor is to incorporate as many languages as you can in your app to support diversity.

6. Lack of Essential Features

For those of you who didn’t know, close to 70% of the bookings that are spontaneous are made from users’ smartphones. This sheds light on the important aspect that your app should support all features that accommodate any spontaneity of your users.

This could be a button to get additional information about a destination, to book flight or cruise tickets, to buy tickets to an amusement park, to avail chauffeur services and more. All travel-related probabilities must be worked on and included as features on your travel industry software solution or app based on your business niche.

Not having even one essential feature would stall your business immediately at that point in time and it is tough to convince the same user to come back to your app to avail travel services or products.

To help you get started, here are some inevitable travel app features –

• Search and filter options
• Third-party services/marketplace for tour operators
• Booking options and features with sorting facilities
• Personalized push notifications on deals, discounts and dates on festivals or important events happening around them or when they are around in a particular date
• Itinerary planner
• Geolocation services
• Multiple payment gateways and digital wallets
• Weather forecaster
• Currency converter
• Expenses splitter
• Emergency listings
• QR scanner and more

Wrapping Up

Apart from these, your travel app could also lack a solid wireframe or a UI/UX that offers poor customer experience, a vague recommendation engine that doesn’t understand customer requirements and preferences, an ineffective algorithm that throws irrelevant search results, security issues and more.

Developing a travel app is tough and as we mentioned earlier, it requires an additional layer of exposure and experience. That’s why we recommend getting in touch with veterans like us who would eliminate all travel software solution mistakes you are likely to incur in the development process and roll out an app that is stable, useful and scalable.

Get in touch with us today.