Enhancing Travel mate by showing hotel price range, getting acquainted with travellers, and creating personal and travelers gallery

App github repository

Components

Travel mate is an open source application available for those that are interested in travel. It is a very nice app that provides users with various features to select the actual destination by organizing trips and making appropriate bookings. The app has many features. However, I will mention a few.

• Destination: It shows the most popular cities. User can also search for other cities, but I think it’s limited to India.

• My trip: It allows users to create and add a trip to a page. You can write your trip name, select your trip date, and the city you are visiting. You can also enter a friend's name.

• My friend: You will see the list of friends you connect with on this page.

• Utilities: This part has five subcategories where users can select and make a list of items, check weather forecasts, access compass to check locations, convert currencies, and check world clock.

• Travel: You would get hotel bookings through this feature. Do online shopping and have access to real-time locator.

These five features are the main features the app has, but when explored, you would still come across some that are not mentioned. I’ve been able to check through this app several times, and I’ve reported almost six bugs on it on GitHub. Which made me understand many things about how it works. Subsequently, I would love to bring up some ideas I think would add more flavor to the existing packages it offers its users.

Components to work on: I will channel my idea towards the. "my trip" feature, the "hotel feature" and also the creation of another feature entirely.

My proposals

The purpose of travel mate is to make users travel experience enjoyable, easy and fun. To make it more unique, the app should have a way of connecting travelers even when they've not met face to face. I will limit this to only people that are in the same location/ localization and those traveling to the same destination.

Idea

• Get acquainted: I would love this feature to be implemented on travel mate. Right now, I think the only way to connect with other travelers is meeting at the point of destination. I've tried to locate a way users can meet other travelers going to the same destination on the app, but all to no avail. The only thing I saw was the meeting up on Twitter, which is far different from locating the set of people traveling to a particular destination at a particular time.

Also, I noticed you can add names of users having the same trip with you but I think that is if you already know the name you want to input. I would have to meet a traveler before adding him/her to my trip. So to some extent, it is not what I wanted to see.

To make this more appealing to users, there should be a way to get acquainted with other travelers going to a certain destination so that other travelers will be able to connect with them easily and have an organized trip if possible. That is why I'm proposing this idea.

• Personal gallery: Everyone travels for different reasons. Some for a business purpose, some for vacation, honeymoon, visitation, competition, fun, and so on. I believe most people traveling to a new place would love to have some pictures as a remembrance, which would lead them to take various pictures of/in different locations.

Creating a user gallery where users can display all these pictures on travel mate would be a nice approach. The picture snapped in various places like Delhi, Pune, Chennai, et cetera, would be paraded. This feature can be beside the profile. It would be nice if users can take pictures directly from the app which will automatically save in the personal gallery. This will ease uploading from phone gallery.

• Travellers images: As I’ve mentioned that personal gallery will be nice, an extraction from it would lead to this feature (travelers images). It would display every pictures/images in one place (a page). Every user can access this page to view different pictures/Images collected.

Each image will have the name of the owner below it. To make this more unique, these images should be downloadable. For privacy purpose, every user should decide whether they want to display their personal gallery images on the traveler’s image page.

The personal gallery will have an off and on button to decide this. However, for flexibility, users can also mark and select some pictures they want to release to the travelers’ page.

• Hotel class and price range: Every city that users can locate on the app have different hotels displayed for travelers to make their bookings. The location of each hotel is accessible, and there is a phone icon to get across to their customer service units, though not accessible at the moment for one reason or another.

I've tried it several times to test if it's working well. I would love the dev team to take not and provide the correct numbers for travelers. Just a digression, this is not my point though. Having a price range of every hotel on the hotel page will help travelers select the hotel they can afford

Mock ups / Examples

Get acquainted images

Personal gallery and travelers image

The hotel price range

Benefits

The get-acquainted feature will allow different travelers to meet easily on the app. Knowing where a particular traveler is heading to will be made easy with this feature.
The personal gallery is meant for the collection of pictures from various visited destinations.
Only pictures taken from a journey is meant for this gallery. There won't be mix up with other photos in the phone gallery.

Travelers image page is also another feature that will enhance users' experience.
Users can have fun from seeing other travelers pictures. You will see different areas people visited. Get to know some things about other places through images, which will give you an insight into how beautiful some other places are. Downloading images would also be nice. Images of places, events, cars, hotels, beach, mountains, hills, and so on will be available for download on this page as well.
The hotel class and price range would help travelers to select the one that is affordable. There are different hotel displayed on the app, and it’s difficult to know which is expensive or moderately affordable. So showing the hotel class and price range would help travelers to visit the right hotel without going through stress to get what they can afford.