Travel Buddy
Travel Buddy was pitched in a Shark Tank style class competition. Travel Buddy is an app designed to make road-tripping a breeze!
Travel Buddy is the app designed to transform road trips from a stressful, chaotic, expensive, and sometimes scary experience into a worry-free, exciting and comfortable one.
Once downloaded, users will choose their starting and final destination and Travel Buddy does the rest of the work! Users will have the opportunity to enter a variety of preferences to make Travel Buddy’s recommendations unique to each user. Travelers with specific interests like hiking, museums, nightlife, or anything of the sort can also identify these in Travel Buddy to include more stops along the way best suited for the user. Dog lover? Travel Buddy has you covered! It’ll help you find dog friendly hotels, parks and stops along the way.
The first factor users input is their overall road trip budget. This helps Travel Buddy decide on things like where to stay, where to eat, places to stop, and even help to find the least expensive gas! Two users traveling the same route will see different recommendations based on this input. For example, Travel Buddy will recommend a user with a relatively low budget to stop at historic landmarks or national parks with low entrance fees. They will stay at budget friendly hotels and eat at less expensive restaurants; their gas expenditure will be important.
If a user is riding with a few friends, Travel Buddy helps organize all of the expenses so it’s easy to split bills! Travelers with specific dietary restrictions need not worry! Travel Buddy finds the best restaurants, drive-thrus, and diet friendly stops along the way.
Safety is a top priority as well. Travel Buddy provides users peace of mind when it comes to safety concerns they may have regarding road trips, especially when traveling through unfamiliar areas. Any gas stations, hotels, and restaurants listed on Travel Buddy will go through a vetting process combining national crime statistics and data. In addition, users of Travel Buddy will also have the ability to provide their ratings, and talk about their experiences at certain locations, similar to Yelp.
Why Travel Buddy?
Travel Buddy caters directly to the growing demand of people who are looking to take road trips since the start of COVID and its added stress on travelling, but don’t know where to begin planning; or just want to take a trip that involves minimal planning. According to Exhibit 1, nearly half of respondents said they are uncomfortable sharing close space with strangers, while 27% of those surveyed believe they will take more of their long-distance trips by car. Though it seems like the end of COVID is due to America’s vaccine rollout, this is not the case in most other countries. People are antsy to travel but restrictions still exist, thereby making road trips a solution for Americans looking for a change of pace at this time.
Travel Buddy combines some aspects of existing apps and websites, such as Splitwise, Gasapp, Travelocity, and Yelp in a single app making it convenient and user friendly, while eliminating the stress that comes with planning a trip. The app will also use the most up to date and integrated information to help users plan trips to ensure that they always receive the best rates. Travel Buddy ensures its users save the time and energy they’d have used to research and plan their trip, thus bringing value to them.
Travel Buddy Users
We believe that Travel Buddy will appeal to a wide range of consumers, from large families to single adventurers. Still, there are three main consumer types who will find Travel Buddy very useful: first-time road trippers, cost-conscious consumers, and spontaneous road trippers/bad planners. Those new to road trips usually spend so much time researching hotels, restaurants, and the safety of the places they are going. With Travel Buddy, they do not have to stress out about this. They can enjoy their trip knowing their concerns are taken care of. Cost-conscious people spend much of their time and energy carefully planning their stops and destinations so that they don’t exceed their budget. Travel Buddy’s manages their budget for them. Finally, we all know that person who waits until the last minute to plan something, or decides to spontaneously do something. Travel Buddy is perfect for these consumers too, who can go on a trip at a moment’s notice, using the “Plan My Trip” feature.
#TravelBuddy
Our marketing strategy aims to position Travel Buddy as the first service that comes to mind when people begin planning their road trips. We will prioritize our APS (app store optimization) and search ads (Exhibit 3), including making improvements on app ratings and user customization. To display the legitimacy of our enterprise, Travel Buddy’s website will prominently feature all the functions provided by the app and our mission of becoming one’s ultimate travel companion (Exhibit 2).
We aim to grow our social media presence by endorsing both organic and paid promotion for greater exposure within the groups of people with greater possibility of initiating unplanned travel such as van life travelers and influencers like @wheresmyofficenow, @divineontheroad and @yvonnepferrer (Exhibit 4). Not only would these influencers be a great fit for Travel Buddy’s brand image, but their followers are likely to enjoy the outdoors, road trips, the adventure lifestyle, and spontaneous trips!
To kickoff our app, we intend on launching a #TravelBuddy campaign on social media. Users simply post photos or videos of themselves on their roadtrips, utilizing the hashtag to be featured on our social media pages. Though simple, we anticipate this to be an easy way to spread word of mouth in regards to Travel Buddy. This can also give us the ability to see who is using our app and where they are going, to optimize our features in future updates.