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Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

While everybody else is ranting about AI, I'll rant about something else: trip planning apps. There have been literally thousands of attempts at this and AFAICT precisely zero have ever gotten any traction. There are two intractable problems in this space.

1) A third party app simply cannot compete with Google Maps on coverage, accuracy and being up to date. Yes, there are APIs you can use to access this, but they're expensive and limited, which leads us to the second problem:

2) You can't make money off them. Nobody will pay to use your app (because there's so much free competition), and the monetization opportunities are very limited. It's too late in the flow to sell flights, you can't compete with Booking etc for hotel search, and big ticket attractions don't pay commissions for referrals. That leaves you with referrals for tours, but people who pay for tours are not the ones trying to DIY their trip planning in the first place.

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There just isn't much friction between having a few tabs open (maps, booking site, airplane site, google search) and a notepad. The friction of searching for an app, downloading it, and then learning how to use it is just higher.

So many products are like this - it sounds good on paper to consolidate a bunch of tasks in one place but it's not without costs and the benefit is just not very high.

I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing, but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.

> They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations

If they become popular they'll have to move to OSM, Google's steep charging for their Maps API at high usage that has brought companies to their knees is well known [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089776

“They’ll have to” is a pretty strong statement assuming you don’t actually have insider information on their API spending.

For now, they do use Google Maps and I’m happy with it. If they stop and it’s no longer as useful to me, maybe I’ll stop using it.

Love Wanderlog!

But I use it as a glorified notes app to keep track of flights, reservations, rental cars, confirmation numbers, etc, in one place, not for trip planning.

They do have user generated lists to help find things to do, but yeah, I mainly use it for organizing ideas and building my final itinerary. It’s really nice for this. I can then also share the itinerary with everybody else on the trip.

That’s why I built all my geo infrastructure from scratch from osm, there’s still some issues but for AI location grounding it outperforms google places for $300/mo

Google has monopoly of places API, I tried foursquare and their public dataset and got tons of wrong locations of the places. It even got the location of the Eiffel tower wrong.

That’s why you have to make your own geocoder

How and how precise is the end data?

It's just another business/service niche that is solved until the current Big Provider becomes Evil or goes under.

Similar to "made for everyone" social networks and video upload platforms.

But there are niches that are trip planning + there are no one solving the pain! For example Geocaching. I always dreamed about an easy way to plan Geocaching routes to travel and find interesting caches on the way. Currently you gotta filter them out and then eyeball the map what seems to be nearby, despite there, maybe, not being any real roads there, or the cache is probably maybe actually lost or has to be accessed at specific time of day.

So... No one wants apps that are already solved + boring.

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