How would you design a travel app specifically for families?

Clarifying Questions

• Target Market: Are we focusing on domestic or international travel?
• Family Composition: Does this include families with young children, teenagers, or multigenerational groups?
• Travel Type: Is this for vacation planning, road trips, or air travel?
• Key Features: Should the app include bookings, itinerary planning, or child-friendly recommendations?

Problem Definition

Traveling with family, especially with young children, can be stressful due to complex planning, lack of child-friendly options, and unpredictable schedules. Families need a one-stop travel solution that simplifies trip planning, provides kid-friendly recommendations, and ensures a smooth, hassle-free experience.

User Personas

1. Teenagers: Want to travel with friends and engage in adventurous activities
2. Adults: Family getaway
3. Old: Family gateways and religious visits

Customer Needs

• Personalized Travel Planning: Custom itineraries based on family preferences.
• Kid-Friendly Recommendations: Hotels, restaurants, and activities suitable for children.
• Flexible Booking Options: Family-friendly cancellation policies and bundled deals.
• Safety & Accessibility: Emergency contacts, medical info storage, and senior-friendly options.

Solutions (Product Features)

1. Family Itinerary Planner: AI-powered itinerary based on preferences (budget, kids ages, interests)
2. Family-Friendly Booking: Search hotels, flights, and attractions with child and senior-friendly options
3. Shared Travel Dashboard: A family dashboard where all members can contribute and track plans
4. Emergency Assistance: Quick access to medical facilities, local pharmacies, and safety tips
5. AI-Powered Packing List: Personalized suggestions based on weather, trip duration, and kids needs
6. Expense Tracker: Helps families plan and split expenses easily
7. Language translator: Helps to translate and communicate in local language (if needed)
8. Vernacular Experience: App availability in regional languages

Prioritize Solutions (Value vs. Effort)

1.     High Priority (Low Effort, High Value): Itinerary planner, Shared travel dashboard, Family-friendly booking

2.     Medium Priority (Higher Effort, High Value): Emergency Assistance, AI-powered packing list, Expense Tracker

3.     Low Priority (High Effort, Low Value initially): Language Translator, Vernacular Experience

Success Metrics

• Adoption Rate: Number of users downloaded the app
• User Engagement: Time spent on the app
• Booking Conversion Rate: % of searches leading to confirmed bookings
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Ratings from families on ease of use and relevance
• Customer Complaints: Issues highlighted by the users
• Churn Rate: Users abandoning the app after first use

Summary

The travel app for families will serve as a comprehensive, stress-free trip planning tool with features like an AI-powered itinerary planner, kid-friendly recommendations, shared family dashboard, and emergency assistance. It will cater to adults, teenagers, and elderly travelers by ensuring convenience, safety, and engagement. Success will be measured by user adoption, engagement, and booking conversion rates.

Before designing the app, let's clarify the scope and constraints:

• Are we an established company or a new startup? → Consider a new company.
• Does "travel" cover end-to-end planning, from bookings to experiences? → Yes, include everything.
• What does "family" mean in this context? → Need to define specific user groups.
• Domestic or international travel? → We'll focus on domestic travel.
• Any constraints? → Not explicitly mentioned, but we assume budget and feasibility constraints.

The goal is to provide a seamless travel experience for families by solving key pain points and ensuring smooth planning. Since we are entering a new market, we need to differentiate ourselves from existing solutions with a family-centric approach.

Families can be divided into:

1. Full family trips (e.g., parents + kids, assume a family of 4)
2. Children arranging trips for parents
3. Couples traveling together

We will focus on full family trips because they involve more complexities—logistics, safety, cleanliness, food preferences, and comfort. If we solve this well, it can also benefit the other segments.

A typical family travel journey consists of:

1. Deciding on a destination
2. Planning & budgeting
3. Shopping for essentials
4. Itinerary planning (researching places, reading articles, watching social media recommendations, etc.)
5. Booking tickets & accommodations
6. Experiencing travel (food, sightseeing, transport, local experiences)
7. Shopping at the destination
8. Returning home

Key challenges faced by families during travel:

1. Choosing a destination → Too many options, budget concerns.
2. Buying necessary items → Time-consuming, lack of guidance.
3. Planning an itinerary → Lack of local knowledge, want hidden & popular places.
4. Finding best-priced tickets & hotels → Difficult to compare.
5. Navigating a new location → Language barriers, transport confusion.
6. Currency exchange issues → If international (not a focus here).
7. Shopping at the right places → Avoiding tourist traps & fake products.
8. Post-trip exhaustion → Managing unpacking, work-life balance.

We'll prioritize the top three core problems, as they are time-consuming and critical to the travel experience:

1. Choosing a destination
2. Planning the itinerary
3. Booking tickets & hotels

- Pre-curated itinerary themes → Categories like "Beach Getaway," "Religious Trip," "Hill Station Adventure," each with detailed plans, budgets, and must-visit spots.
- Detailed itinerary within themes → Includes major attractions, food recommendations, and cultural experiences.
- Integrated booking system → Partner with third-party services (like MMT, Goibibo) to show the best deals for flights & hotels, embedded in our app.
- Ask an Expert → Community-driven insights where experienced travelers share itineraries, answer queries, and provide recommendations.

💡 VR-based previews → Users can explore destinations in VR before booking.
💡 Personal travel assistant → A human guide from our company helps with itinerary, bookings, and on-trip support.

To evaluate our app’s success, we’ll track:

• User engagement → Time spent exploring itineraries.
• Conversion rate → Users completing bookings.
• Retention rate → Families returning for their next trip.
• NPS → Measuring customer satisfaction. 

I will start with understanding the Scope , Goal and Constraints for the app.

1. Goal: 

   1. Why are we building this app?

   2. Why are we specifically targeting the families?

2. Scope

   1. Is it for any specific country ?

   2. Are we planning for MVP or a full fledged app?

3. Constraints:

   1. Do we have any deadlines?

   2. Do we have any tech constraints like limited resources?

Assumptions:

1. There are lots of travel apps that are cultured with features and no one is specifically catered with family trips.

2. We are creating for India

3. We are planning to launch a MVP

Users and pain points are:

1. Young People: Who wants to book a trip for their parents aged above 50

   1. Want the family security 

   2. Want to track their journey and stay connected with frequent updated

   3. Want every things sorted from hotel, food, and ease of travel.

   4. Need atleast 3 star hotel

2. Users who want to book a trip with their family

   1. Want family friendly hotels

   2. Should include places which cater to childrens as well

3. Old people who are planning a trip with the friends circle

   1. Mostly planning trips to temples like Kedarnath

   2. Wants a guide to take care of everything

   3. Need accommodation or plan for atleast 10-15 people

Based on the Pain Points the features we need are.

1. Tour and travels package which cover every things

   1. Package to be customized for each user

2. Users can list the demands with the tours company and based on that can negotiate the price.

3. Secure payment method

4. Timeline update of the trip and location on the app

   1. Including pictures, notification and messages

   2. Weather condition

5. Recommendation feature to suggest packages and places

6. Verification of the tour company and their rating and reviews. Initially sourced from google

For MVP we can go with 1,2,4,6 as they all have high impact.

Question : How would you design the travel app specifcally for families ? 

Clarifying Question : 

- What is meant by a travel app ? We will try and define the scope of the travel app 

             - Is it only ticket booking ?

             - Does it include any specific line of business like hotels, flights, etc. ? 

            - Does it include experiences done during travel ? like going on ride, watersports, etc. 

             - Is it planning the entire holiday with a relationship manager ?

             - Does it also include additional services like forex card, visa approval, etc.

- Who would be the target audience of the app ? 

           - Any specific country ?

           - Any specific group ? 

- On which platform are we going to launch this app ? 

      - Is it android 

      - Is it Ios 

      - Is it more on the website ? 

- How would we build the supply for the travel app ? Since this would help to decide on the pricing in the travel app 

                      - Is it inventory purchase ? 

                      -  Is it via third party ? 

- Which market do we want to launch this travel app ? Any specific geography ? 

- Any existing competitors we have in the market ? or are we the early birds in the market ? 

- What are the alternatives of travel app currently in the market ? 

Post Clarifying Questions : 

Once we have asked all these clarfying questions, now for the purpose of answering this question. Let me pick following : 

User Segment - 

- Family 

     - Couples 

     - Family of 3/4 

     - Large size families >4 

All these families are from India & we are currently building mobile app(android) for these familes traveling to international destinations 

Positioning would be for each target segment - 

- Couple ( We will try to position in honeymoon category ) 

- Family of 3/4 & Large size family ( We will try and position to provide package services in nearby countries to India like Dubai, Thailand, etc. ) 

We are also assuming that we are the category creators and currently no competitor exists in the market 

Currently the alternative of a travel app in the market is offline ticket booking & experiences 

Pain points to solve via travel app : 

- A user has to do multiple visits for offline booking of his travel  

- A user has to pay a hefty commission for his booking 

- A user is not sure of the experience and whom to reach out if anything goes wrong 

- A user wants to explore and compare multiple options & different experiences which he/she can do it on a holiday

GTM Strategy - 

Pre launch - 

Since we are category creators , acquistion of new users by selling them functional aspects like it is fast to book from the book with no commission fees

Launching marketing campaigns for our target segment 

Building our product - going through the development cycle 

Building our supply in international countries 

Getting app store page ready 

During launch - 

Measure acquisition numbers & conversion done on the app 

Understand the reason of non-conversion 

Retarget the high potential users 

Post launch - 

Measure measure measure all the key metrics of revenue generation, retention, etc. 

Following would be the Success Metrics for the launch of the app : 

Key Metrics

-Sign up to the product

-DAU,WAU,MAU

-Products listed,viewed,bought

-Revenue earned from commissions of products sale(Monetization)