Show HN: A travel tool to discover destinations based on your budget
destigogo.com
destigogo.com
1. upon loading, the web site immediately asks permissions for sending notifications and access to my location - that's too early and because of that, of course, "No, thanks". Notifications about what? Location - why? Since it's not mobile app and I didn't read the description before installing it, the request should be done only after some explanation of service is provided.
2. False data (and this ruins the whole idea). The trip from Moscow to Iceland is unlikely to cost $500 for two nights/two adults and when your service shows 5500 Rub per night average price for stay, it does not offer any accommodation less than 80KRub per night. Finding the flights at declared price is impossible: there's no UI to specify dates, as requested by error message (and minimal prices cannot be found by search on specific dates anyway).
All that said, it's too early to discuss the result - fix the bugs and UX issues first.
Everyone is trying to push their notifications on you these days...
- There's a slight CSS issue on buttons not clearing text: http://imgur.com/a/FVvj8
- As I've entered my area, it would be useful if the "from airport" on the result page would default to "area airports"
- I'd like a map view of the destinations
- I'd like to be able to filter the lodging accommodations based on stars and type (personal home, BnB, hotel) as there are some regions in the world that I've learned to only use hotels when it's sight-unseen and without recommendation
Congrats again!
I'm normally a huge map fan, but I actually like it the way it is, without a map. I had this cool moment where I thought, "It doesn't matter where in the world it is, as long as it is under your budget."
I haven't figured out how to pass all the menus after clicking a destination. I typed in an airport and clicked Search Flights, but it complains that I haven't entered dates. Can't find a place to enter them.
If you type your airport or place where you want to fly from and select an option out the suggestion dropdown you should be able to select the dates!
Thanks for the feedback, we will solve this!
- Have you tried pushing the more info button? When you do, it wil scroll down.
- Ah yeah, do you mean showing a list of nearby airports? We are working on that one :)
- Allright, i'll write that down!
- True, that would add a lot of value in terms of UX. We have that planned for the near future.
Thank you for your feedback!
Either a list of nearby airports or do metropolitan radius (e.g. NYC means LGA, JFK, sometimes Newark).
And no worries. Launching is a big win.
We are planning to work that out soon :)
Thanks a lot for your feedback mjolk.
My brother and I would like to show you what we have been working on for the past 6 months.
What started out as a little project to learn to code together has become a full-fledged travel tool to discover destinations you wouldn't directly think of.
It's called DESTIGOGO :)
We are curious about what you think and happy to answer any questions you have!
2) Needs current temps instead of average. Current implementation has quirks like sending you to Winnipeg for sun.
3) Can't book/find dates where you can get these prices. So I can't even comment on if they are real and/or use the site for its intended purposes.
4) shouldn't suggest a holiday where I'm coming from.
keep at it though, if this worked as advertised it could be my go to site for booking vacations.
1) I think that's an incident, we've collected all the images by hand - so the error rate should be very low. Apparently we made a mistake for the blue mountains, canada - so thanks for mentioning :)
2) True, we'll implement current temps very soon :)
3) Working on that, for now you need to select an airport from the dropdown list to ensure that the dates become visible.
4) Sure, we'll fix that.
Thank your for your feedback yaur. That would be awesome :)
My feedback:
1)Some images don't belong to the destinations, see for example: Tsilivi from Greece
2)Add reviews / comments - in this way you'll have new content on your site (good for seo)
3)Create unique title, meta title and meta description for each destination
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
Right now I'm looking to Capri, Italy, but the search engines don't know it because the title is DESTIGOGO and there's no meta data.This is very important for SEO.
4) If after a week your website traffic is still growing, you should consider an investment in mobile apps.
Good luck!
Thank you for your awesome feedback!
1) True, but it belongs to Zakynthos island, where Tsivili is located. Sometimes we had to choose for a more general place near the city we are mentioning, to get a decent image. And since it is very near, we think it's ok (When you will go to Tsivili, you definately will visit Navagio beach (Shipwreck Beach).
2) Planning to!
3) Good one! Is it ok to generate it dynamically (does Google find it in then?)
4) We'll thake that into account! But we'll first focus on developing the web app further and add features :)
Thank you!
Just some initial feedback:
1) I want to specify an airport / dates before searching. I live in the DC area where there are 3 different airports prices could be from, but only like to fly out of one.
2) When I try and look at a destination, and find flights, I cannot seem to find where to add the dates, which it complains about not having.
3) Scroll wheel doesn't seem to affect zoom on the map at the location. That's taking away an expected feature of the map, and not something I like.
4) Number of people up front along with total budget. Sharing hotel rooms makes thing much cheaper where hotels are expensive. You could have a more expensive flight and go somewhere more interesting for the same amount.
5) Once I am on the results page, I might want to filter out specific countries and not just whole regions. Or I might even take a whole region, but I can't seem to add a filter after the fact.
6) Why does the 'Home' button open a new tab? If I am clicking home I want it in this tab. In fact I always want it in the current tab. I will 'Open in new Tab' if I want it in a new tab.
7) You have a way to get reminded about the site for later travel, but what if I want to book now for a Spring Break trip? How do a search for a trip 2-3 months from now? I am not planning a trip like this site is useful for last minute.
8) Maybe its just me but 'Return' flight is not what I am used to calling it. Normally that is referred to as a 'Round Trip' flight.
None of the keyboard scrolling methods work. I can't use pgdown, arrow down, even the old school "space to scroll"
On search page, changing duration erases my budget, why? Just because I might be able to stay a day or two longer, or am willing to cut my stay short, doesn't mean my budget is changing.
What is the p.p. currency? On search page I set it to USD, yet I keep seeing it p.p. everywhere?
Once I open a location destination (why a new tab?), it forgets where I am flying from, so for flight search I have to retype my city.
Awesome page, this is what I was looking for, but few minor things need to be fixed up.
Some great additional options you mention there. For now, we have chosen to take averages for most of things to keep things simple and don't have the user to think about every detail. Besides, these variables differ heavily (oil prices per country differ, fuel consumption per car too, etc.)
Visa information is a think we have planned to add very soon :) Also more additional information like that we are planning to implement soon :D
Ps. I really like how this thing is popping up everywhere, first YC group, after that PH and now HN.
Edit to add: I love the design, and I love the idea. Keep adding to it!
Thanks a lot! :)
Most large/successful aggregator travel sites feel like they've been "optimizing for revenue" for a long time. It's really informed the products in very fundamental way.
AirBnB is an example of vastly better than average design. But, even here I think the site has in recent years gradually been more focused around being "revenue-optimized." People browsing tree-houses in tropical rain forests they may one day visit is not optimal when compared to the "I need 3 beds in Milan next Thursday" people. To make your KPIs go up you need to direct those people who have their credit card out already to a thing that they will pay for now. This is not bad, but it does leave an opening.
Anyway... I think there is plenty of room for a travel site that emphasizes browsing. This site is fast and feels like it wants me to just browse.
Nicely done. I wish (and predict) you success, Kevin.
Pulling my hair I finally found a destination that had flights and the date selector displayed correctly.
It gives me the impression that my destinations can largely vary depending on intermediary (this) app rates.
Let me explain my point:
Assuming I have a budget of £X of which I search against, I should get the results of £X - £Y (middle app commission) which obviously leads me to get results for potentially lower than my budget destinations could actually be.
It gives me the sense of loss of control or lack of choice if you may.
While searching on another websites I will be able to judge wether I accept or not the asked price (including commissions), In here I won't be able to.
Edit: added a few destinations to #3
I see that you're using Booking & Skyscanner, so maybe it's one of those, but where do the beautiful destination images come from?
Yes that's true, but we are only using them for flights and hotels.
The images come from Shutterstock. Firstly we hand curated 650+ destinations, then we hand picked all the images and bought them at shutterstock :') They are all beautiful, but it was a real pain in the ass selecting them haha. We did like 50 pics in 3 hours..
Instead, ask for them when they are relevant - for location, maybe once they click the "From" box.
For notifications, build your own in-app message explaining why the user wants notifications. If they "Accept" your own box, show them the actual notification request.
Many people, especially HN users, will have ill-will against a site that immediately wants to send pop-ups to their browsers. It feels too much like spam, trying to catch unaware users. If you explain why first, it's less intrusive.
I know this is just the MVP and lots of improvements in the pipeline. here is something I am missing:
When I click adventure, none of the options that come up seem very adventurous to me. Just mainly tourist destinations. No eastern Europe.
PS: The map in the accommodations view needs some padding on the left side.
PPS: Only car and plane :)
Just let users type in a number rather than having to find it on your list.
Local currencies (GBP) and temperatures (C) would also help!
<input type="number" name="someName" />
One feature request is instead of putting "2 days" or "4 days" I'd like to be able to say leave on Friday afternoon, come back Sunday night, or 7 days leaving on a Friday...
So my question is: how will you differentiate yourself from the other 1000 budget trip planning tool other than a better interface?
Also how will you acquire your users? Travel startups are on of the hardest to acquire users, merely because it's so expensive
Will take a look at it on my laptop when I reach the office, but this is a great idea and something I've been thinking would be super useful if I had!
A couple of small suggestions.
If I set my budget your app "fills" it leaving no room for food/in-country travel/etc. Maybe you could had a measure of how much people want to spend on such things - perhaps as a percentage but presented as fixed options (I eat out a lot, I visit attractions a lot)? Or make it more obvious somehow that this is the "bare cost" of getting to and staying somewhere.
Perhaps consider only rendering the first page or two of results - then load more in as I scroll. On my 2015 MBP it hangs a little when loading in all the tiles (in Firefox and Chrome).
Thanks for your suggestions! Since it is always questionable how much someone would spend (and very depending on the person itself) we didn't take into account cost of living. My brother and I had a few discussions about this since I wanted to show 'the whole package', but he convinced me to keep just keep it simple and add additional 'cost of living' info later on, at the destination page. For now I still agree with, he has some good points. Although it differs from person to person what is preferred.
Loading in results on page scroll should be really neat. I think it will speed up loading time tremendously, definately going to look into that!
The 50 mile (or km) radius is a good start, but I'd prefer it to be an adjustable radius or be able to toggle in country or out of country.
Of course, in-country only might be difficult if you aren't familiar with a country.
Haven't found an app that really does this well. Tried adioso, sky scanner, kayak, anyone knows something else let me know. Adioso is closest, but I still find I have to be too specific
When it shows out-of-country options like "Grand Cayman" it routes your flights from your location to "FL" (closest airport to Cayman) and then seems to drop the ball there. The results for skyscanner shows cayman, but I don't see the flight anywhere. It's not a clear UI.
Small thing, you must type the airport identifier in caps ("LAX" vs "lax") if you want it to find it.
Ah that could be, we couldn't test all scenarios but for some destinations we indeed need to fine tune.
Thanks for mentioning, we'll fix that :D
I suspect Firefox doesn't handle such a large number of results well.
Nice site though. Works well on mobile, and you're. It spamming me with ads like the other players do.
Good luck!
I fly out of HSV most often and it is one of the most expensive airports in the US. It seems most of your estimates for me are off by a factor of 2 or 3.
Does the duration include travel time? I'm in London and it suggests flying to India and Peru for a 3 day weekend trip. I'd be nice to see how much time you'd actually have at the destination, given a certain amount of days off, especially for short trips.
Waterloo, Canada is not the same as Waterloo, Belgium.
There may be a feature to choose a preferred day of week for departure, for example a 4-day trip that departs on Thursday. If not, that would be helpful.
London, Canada, that is.
Though the wikivoyage.org link points at London, England.
Also, video on about page seems rather slow.
- drive there and back in 2 days - The prices doesnt factor in costs of me (or doesnt seem to) getting a ferry, train etc out of the UK
You're temperature is fake.
I would suggest auto filling the airport field once I tap into a certain destination. I already provided my location on the front page.
We are planning to make that work soon :)
-I can travel for x hours.
-Price between x and y.
-I accept only x transfer flights.
-Temperature in destination have to be x to y.
One request though, temperatures in °C, Fahrenheit is pretty much meaningless to me.
Yes true, we are from the Netherlands so also want to have temperatures as °C.
We made a little mistake by relating Fahrenheit to currency (USD). We'll fix that :)
May I ask where you're from?
You can add hitchhiking option since it's popular in some parts of the world.
Overall: good job!
First things first, you have two versions of jQuery in your source code:
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.2.0/jquery.min.js
https://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js
Why?--------
You're using Javascript to alter text colors of your labels when the form input/select element is hovered, but you're using CSS :hover/:focus/:active states to govern background colors of the form fields.
So this means that I can hover one of the select elements, turning its label's text red and its background white; then focus that select element when using it, and then move the mouse cursor away -- the label text remains white, and thus invisible until I focus on something else.
Here is a screenshot of what I am trying to describe: http://i.imgur.com/uXqRpDE.png
It's a complete waste of Javascript's time to do such trivial things; the timing will be out of sync compared to the heavily optimised CSS transition; and it's just bad coding to have two identical and connected tasks divided such that one is governed by the CSS and the other by jQuery soup. Good luck maintaining that.
Just use CSS to govern the hover states of the labels as well. It should be trivial to set up a transition as you did for the select element.
--------
I've been using the word 'label', but that's not the element you've used, but rather the element you should be using instead of a div and p.
<!-- BAD -->
<div class="duration">
<p>HOLIDAY DURATION</p>
</div>
<!-- GOOD -->
<label class="duration" for="dagen">
<span>HOLIDAY DURATION</span>
</label>
HTML5 has been designed for the provision of semantic meaning, it makes both your code clearer to you later down the line and also makes the site/app more accessible.--------
I concur with this comment by nailer a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13461341&goto=item%3Fi...
--------
Also, your Google Analytics tracking code is the first thing in the document. That's not a great idea -- unless you think a page view should be registered even before the page has been, well, viewed. Most choose to stick the tracking code at the end of the body element, or as the last element of the head element, depending on how honestly they want to report on pageviews. Either way, the first thing that should be read by a browser is a charset declaration (utf-8).
--------
Also, in your CSS you have a bit that looks like this:
* {
overflow: none;
}
There is no such thing, that's just a CSS parser error. You can say overflow: hidden, but I'd be cautious about doing that. Generally speaking, if you have understood the CSS box model correctly, you should not need to govern the overflow of all of your elements like that. If yours is an edge case, where it's necessary to have some overflow, you might want to consider setting overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: auto on html/body elements instead.--------
Also, no offence, but that jQuery code is looking pretty smelly. I know you're beginners, and you've accomplished something very cool here, you should be proud, but I can't help but feel as though you've picked an approach to web development that you'll want to unlearn if you are serious about web development.
I'm not talking about using React when I say that -- I tend to work without a framework of any kind, unless I'm working with a team. I'm talking about learning about function composition, and learning about functional programming techniques in general. It will cut your code down to size and make it much easier to navigate and debug.
React just so happens to force a functional approach to webdev, and it's very trendy at the moment, so it might be worth your investing time to study it. Otherwise, Marijn Haverbeke's book 'Eloquent JavaScript' (eloquentjavascript.net) is a good thing to start off with. It doesn't cover jQuery, and I think that's why I always recommend it to anyone wishing to develop for the front-end: the last thing you should learn is jQuery, and then by the time you do come to learn it, you won't need it.
--------
Also, 4 web fonts, 9+ weights? Yikes, bye bye 2G/3G users. Still, if you must destroy people on slower connections, at least combine these as was intended:
<!-- BAD -->
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Heebo:100,300,400" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Karla" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Quicksand:300,400,700" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,600" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<!-- GOOD -->
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Heebo:100,300,400|Open+Sans:300,600|Quicksand:300,400,700|Karla" rel="stylesheet">
That will cut your HTTP requests down a bit, and make for less ugly code. Consider bundling each of your CSS source files together, unless you're counting on HTTP/2 to save the day.Thanks for putting so much work in writing this all, really appreciate it! Will implement these optimizations ASAP!
Our code indeed looks awfull but we just wanted to ship now, since we just finished it and it functioned well enough. We decided to clear it up later (very soon though) so your tips and suggestions are amazing :)
A feature I'd love to see, which I haven't seen anywhere, is filtering by day of week. I want to search for 3 day holidays that start on a Friday, for example.
Allright, we'll think about how to implement that one!
I did a search by plane only, for 5 days, budget of 1200. Myrtle beach was shown twice