Mobile apps are a way to define how we move around in life. To travel biz as well, there is no significant exception we can experience. Owing to planning a trip, travelers around the world prefer their mobiles more than anything else. As per research, 80% of travelers had made a trip search on their mobile apps in 2018.
From this perspective, you can assume how important it is to bring a big investment surge through travel app development. And, if you are interested to build a travel app, you need to consider some key things such as your business model, important features, and also your budget.
Through a close analysis of travel mobile app development, we would help you with the best things required to build a successful travel app. Let’s find them.
Steps to building a travel app
There are usually several ways to combine while
. They include,
- The objective of the travel app
- Market analysis
- Travel app features
- Hiring travel app developers
- Promoting the app to travel market
Travel app objective
Determining what your travel app should concentrate on is critical to the success of your app. In that case, know your objectives to build one travel app. There are different service areas in which travel apps can work. So, evaluate your project goal and navigate through app types.
Different types of travel operating in the travel industry are,
- Flight booking apps
- Accommodation booking apps
- Transport apps
- Travel guides apps
- Backpackers apps
Based on the travel app types, you can decide features and functionalities.
Market analysis
A step to creating a successful travel app does depend on how your competitors are doing. Unless you analyze the market, it is tough to find out the best performing traveling apps, features and functionalities doing rounds in the arena. In addition, you can discover the unique features of the most popular travel apps. If your budget permits, you can run a market survey to harness customer data about their preferences to sneak into some positive perspective.
Travel app features
How do you determine what features are best for your travel app that complement users’ perspectives? This is important before you jump into building your app. Preferably you closely study apps offering a similar service like yours. Find out what niches attract your attention and note down them in a sheet. You can explain these features during the development of wireframing to your mobile app development agency or developer. Your assessment would help you to bring the best travel app for users with a surge in memberships.
Hiring a travel app development company or a developer?
For a long-term goal achievement, going along with an established mobile app development company works better than with a freelancer developer. Hire an expert team of mobile app developers once your MVP is ready. Remember, your development team must comprise of
- Project manager
- App developers
- UI/UX designers
- Quality analysts
Promoting the app travel domain
Soon after the development and deployment of the travel app, you must ensure its launch on the appropriate travel platforms. Failing or delaying to do so, your app may not get that exposure it needs to become successful among users. Get it promoted with assistance from an expert marketing agency that can run an ad campaign across social media platforms and also print media.
After considering your objectives, it is essential you understand its models so that you know how it functions.
Models of a tourism app development
Be it a travel app or tourism app, it has three key components to generate revenues.
- Merchant model
- Third-party model/commission fees
- Advertising model
- Merchant model
Using a platform like merchant models, owners can make money through resale to guests from hotel owners. Here, a hotel can offer reduced price rates for guests since merchants buy the packages in bulk. Besides, customers can avail offers on various services such as airfares, rentals and others. Expedia offers services as a merchant model.
- Third-party/commission fees
Platforms that help small hotel owners attract customers and generate revenues is none more than third-party collaborators between customers and services. And third-party app owners earn commissions through the transaction of booking taking place between the buyers and hotel owners. Booking.com offers such services.
- Advertising
This is an ad model for small agents that sell different types of service ads such as flight tickets, hotels, tour packages and more. It earns money through pay-per-click redirecting customers to third-party websites.
A detailed walkthrough core features of a travel app
We are going to highlight some of the most essential features of a travel app that every travel domain must focus on to incorporate them. Check with them.
- Signup
Any app must include this core feature. So do travel apps. Registration is central to allowing your users to book hotels or trips, chatting with the host, saving payment history or tracking the status of your booking. Although browsing the app does not allow any registration, for those essential jobs, your user must log in the app.
These days, the client profile registration can go beyond the traditional email/phone number details/ password management. For improved user experience, social login can prove effective and faster for engagement.
Figure 1 sign up screen (Dribble.com)
- Travel planning
This feature helps users plan their trips and itinerary in an orderly fashion. Besides, scheduling trips, destination searches, information on travel tips and buying e-tickets are easy with this feature.
Figure 2Trip planning feature in an app (Dribble.com)
- Navigation and maps
Safety is key when traveling concerning unknown locations, destinations, places around, and also people. GPS-enabled navigation and maps could be most probably the best feature and common ones to give users error-free travel data to move around. iOS and Android include this integration and offer a flexible tour.
Figure 3Navigation and maps
- In-app booking
Travelers need a smooth experience on their tour. Keeping this in mind, most travel apps offer various service booking facilities such as ticketing, accommodation, tours and many. Many app developers use tools like booking APIs tools to implement this functionality.
Figure 4 in-app booking
- Location information
Every trip needs to be made fantastic. Travelers need to have information about local delicacies, local shopping market as well as emergency services. Most apps accomplish these services through embedded GPS.
Figure 5Location search
- Listings
Listing information is essential to give users in-depth information about a place of accommodation, available room services, and food in the local restaurants and so on. This feature would help users find information related to address, reviews, various policies, and booking dates.
Figure 6 listing
- Notifications
Push notifications can inform users about updates related to discounts and reminders prior to the trips. Besides, updates of offers and reminders, travel apps can also include weather forecast notifications.
Figure 7 Push Notifications
- Search system/Voice search
More than anything else, today’s travelers want to leverage voice search capability while booking a trip or travel-related services. Voice search tools can do this impeccably.
Figure 8 Voice Search
- Reviews and recommendations
This is one of the much-needed features of a travel guide app. Users need to review every service before they invest in a service. Reviews and recommendations section help guide properly and enable a better user experience.
Figure 9 reviews and recommendations in an app
Other than these key features, a travel app includes some unique features too.
Some unique features
- Backpacking features
Avid travelers looking for economic travel options can benefit from backpacking features. It offers reasonable travel solutions to travelers.
Figure 10 Backpacking features in an app
- Expense tracking
Spending and reimbursements are important aspects of managing your expenses on a tour. When traveling, expense tracker may help you get out of difficulties with expense management.
Figure 11expense tracking feature
- Currency converter
This is an important feature when you travel to other countries. Currency converter in an app helps avoid miscalculations related to currency value.
Figure 12currency converter
Once you have gathered necessary information about an app for your travel agency business, you can now decide to build a dynamic app.
How to Build a Travel App MVP
Mobile app MVP is an essential way to embark on to determine how elegantly it meets the user’s experience. MVP helps you lower the cost and avoid glaring errors if any.
A minimum viable product is an app designed to include minimal features of an app to solve users’ problems.
Let’s see how you can do the minimal project viable testing.
- In the first phase of MVP app development, you can build an app with minimum features.
- Launch its beta version in the market to test its viability.
- Analysis reveals its potential to be successful.
MVP is the most reliable tool to ensure your users’ trust and loyalty to your product. At the same time, you can gauge the need for an appropriate budget for the app development.
Advantages of an MVP
As explained earlier, an MVP can be well-defined guidelines to support app development companies gather crucial information from the users and test its usability. As you use it, it quickens your vision of developing the right app. Advantages it includes,
Lowered development cost
As opposed to money needed to build an app, MVP offers initial testing to uncover the app’s features in limited resources, thus helping you save you money.
Analyze your project:
Analyzing the capability of your apps is ideal to know how effectively it can improve customer engagement and generate revenues. If you are confident about your project’s success, you can develop one.
Look for review:
Make sure that your app can solve a particular user issue. Therefore, a place for user feedback is an essential component to consider its application. You can use feedback to find through the most important and insignificant app features so that it can address user challenges after launch.
Looking for investors:
Getting financial support from investors is every owner’s primary objective. When your MVP idea is ready, bring it to the notice of investors to increase its possibility to become available.
Time-saving:
An app is subject to failure or success post-launch. So, MVP is the right tool to understand its demands or engaging factors in a short time.
An MVP of an app gives all-round benefits of how you can preview an app’s usability and its high-demands amongst the users.
How Much Does It Cost To Build a Travel App?
It takes more than $ 2 million to build a travel app for Android and iOS platforms. It also includes other service charges for product upkeep and upgrades. Most of the time, it depends on how your mobile app development company handles the project and finish it.
Development tools it requires?
To build your travel app, the modern tech stack can give you the best performance and smooth development experience.
Swift and Objective –C- these programming languages can work best for iOS platforms, while Java or Kotlin offers better mobile engineering solutions for Android users.
Other than this, you can also use web frameworks such as JavaScript, Node.js, Angular.js, and passport.js.
These technologies are required depending on the type of services you want to build.
Wrapping up
After you read this, so many queries of yours could be solved related to travel app development. If you are keen to develop ones like that of booking.com, TripAdvisor, or Airbnb, contact Bytes Technolab. We have an expert team of UI/UX designers and experienced developers to give your project a true vision. Ask for a quote today.
