Building a Travel App with Customer Behavior in Mind

Are you planning to develop a travel mobile app? Creating a good app starts with understanding the customer journey. From getting people excited about traveling to booking trips, finding their way in new places, and sharing memories, a travel app should help users every step of the way. In this article, we'll look at key features and tips for travel mobile app development that puts the customer experience first.

What is a travel customer journey?

The customer journey is all about the experiences a person has from start to finish when they travel. It's everything they think, feel, and do along the way.

Mobile travel apps can make this journey easier and better. They can give trip ideas, help with booking, and provide helpful info during the trip. Apps can also let travelers share their memories after they get back home.

With a clear picture of every step of the travel customer journey, you can develop an app that truly connects with travelers and makes their experiences more seamless and rewarding.

Inspiration: Travel Recommendations and Notifications

To inspire users and fuel their wanderlust, focus on curating visually stunning and engaging content like professional travel photos, short videos, stories from experienced travelers, and blog posts describing unique experiences. Integrate social features allowing users to save, share, and comment on content. Provide categories and filters to make it easy to discover trending destinations and experiences.

Build a recommendation engine that suggests inspiring places and itineraries based on users' interests, saved content, location, and seasonal factors. The engine should provide a mix of trending, up-and-coming, and hidden gem locations within their budget and trip duration. For extra personalization, allow users to rate and review recommendations. Over time, the engine will gain a deeper understanding of preferences to provide highly tailored suggestions.

Publish content highlighting locations and experiences ideal for the current season or upcoming holidays and events. Feature collections of warm-weather escapes for winter, cultural festivals for spring, road trips for summer, and fall foliage viewing spots. Themed content gives users motivation and new reasons to start planning their next adventure.

Send targeted push notifications highlighting inspiring travel stories, deals, trending destinations, and recommendations to trigger users' fear of missing out and nudge them closer to booking a trip. Notifications keep your app and its content fresh in users' minds, leading to increased engagement and travel planning activity. However, avoid oversending notifications, which can lead to frustration and the user's disabling them.

Planning: Itineraries, AI, Real-Time Updates

An ideal travel app enables users to craft daily itineraries complete with locations, timings, and notes. They should be able to save multiple itineraries for a single trip to account for different scenarios or interests. The app should provide an intuitive interface for adding, removing, and reorganizing itinerary items efficiently.

Any avid traveler has a list of must-see locations, restaurants, hotels or events for their destination. Your app should allow users to save places that interest them, ideally with notes about why it appeals to them or their traveling party. Having these saved spots in one place makes planning activities and crafting itineraries much simpler.

Travel-focused A.I. bots are becoming more popular. These bots can help find places to go, make plans, look for places to stay and flights, and map out road trips. They get a lot of information quickly and save travelers time searching the web. Including these A.I. features in your travel app can make it even more useful and convenient for users.

An important part of a helpful travel app is providing real-time updates on any travel warnings, weather forecasts, or local events that could affect a user's plans. Your app should let customers choose to get alerts about big weather warnings, problems with public transport, or other news about where they're going. Staying up to date on the latest information lets travelers make changes to their plans and avoid possible problems.

Booking: Up-Sell, Cross-Sell, Simplify

Offering deals and promotions is key to driving bookings. Work with travel suppliers to provide exclusive rates and discounts for app users. You can also curate and display deals from other sites. Promote time-sensitive offers like flash sales to encourage impulse bookings.

The booking flow should be as seamless and simple as possible. Save user details and payment info for faster checkout on return visits. Allow booking for multiple passengers at once. Give options to pay now or pay later at the travel provider. Send booking confirmations and itineraries via the app.

Use the booking process as an opportunity to up-sell additional travel products like rental cars, activities, travel insurance, or extra baggage allowance. Display relevant add-ons based on the user's trip details. Package deals together at a lower price to increase the perceived value. With 39% of travelers reporting that their travel budget will be higher than the previous year, these upsell opportunities are unlikely to go unnoticed or place a significant burden on users.

Keep helping users even after they've booked. Give them resources to get ready for the trip and manage their bookings. Make it easy for them to access e-tickets, schedules, and other travel papers through the app. Offer a help center that's open 24/7 for support with bookings and handling any changes or cancellations.

Pre-trip: Packing Lists, Reminders, Stress-Free Experience

As the departure date approaches, a travel app should provide useful pre-trip features to ensure customers have a smooth experience. Packing lists and reminders are valuable for any traveler. An app could provide suggested packing lists for different trip types like business, leisure, or adventure. Customers could use these as a starting point and change them based on what they need. The app should give reminders for important things to do before the trip, like confirming hotel bookings, checking in for flights, renewing passports, updating health records, and arranging how to get to the airport.

Organizing a trip can be an overwhelming task, causing a lot of stress. By creating a well-made mobile app, you can reduce it for your travelers to manageable levels. In fact, this effort is a great way to build a good reputation with your users. Younger generations, especially Millennials and Gen Z, have shown the most appreciation for travel apps that help lower the stress of planning and taking a trip. Studies have found that 84% of Millennial respondents and 81% of Gen Z travelers value very highly these kinds of stress-reducing travel apps.

In-Trip: Maps, Transportation, and Communication

Integrate maps that offer walking, driving, and public transit directions so travelers can navigate to their destinations. Allow users to save locations like hotels, restaurants, and points of interest to route to them easily. Provide estimated travel times so they can efficiently plan their itinerary.

For those not renting a vehicle, provide information on local transit, ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and taxi services. List schedules, fares, pickup/drop-off points, and travel times. Allow travelers to book and pay for some services directly within the app for a seamless experience.

Offline access is essential for traveling. The app should have an offline mode that allows access to important information even without data or Wi-Fi. This includes booking confirmations, itineraries, maps, translation tools, and recommendations. An offline travel journal feature would allow customers to record memories, photos, videos, and notes that sync once connectivity is reestablished.

Communication is everything, especially when you are on the road. Include options for calling local emergency services in the destination country. Provide access to an international calling app or rates for calling landlines/mobiles. Allow travelers to connect with hotels and tour providers. Consider a chat feature for exchanging messages with other app users, posting questions about the local area, and sharing tips.

Post-trip: Reviews, Special Offers, Social Community

Prompt travelers to provide reviews and ratings of locations they visited. This feedback helps improve recommendations for other users and gives travelers a chance to reminisce about their trip. Ask open-ended questions about favorite memories or highlights to gather more qualitative insights.

Push notifications with special offers for booking future trips based on the user's interests and past travels. For example, if a user visits Italy, send a promotion for a tour of Tuscany wineries. These tailored communications make the app invaluable for planning subsequent vacations.

Create ways for travelers to stay connected with others they met on their trip or who share similar interests. For example, offer a forum where people can post photos from their adventures and comment on others' posts. Build features for users to follow each other, message directly, or join interest-based groups. An engaged social community gives people an outlet to extend the joy of traveling even after they've returned home.

Conclusion

By understanding the traveler's journey and building features to support customers at each stage, you can create an app that provides real value. With the right mix of utility and usability tailored to the travel journey, you'll be on your way to developing a successful and widely-used travel app. Keep the traveler at the center and you can't go wrong.