There is one industry that continues to experience growth in spite of all the doldrums with the economy and the increasing market volatility. Naturally, travel and tourism businesses in spite of facing downturns and temporary slowdowns, never fail to hope for a revival and getting back on track.
As our world is increasingly getting competitive and most of us remain crushed under the rolling wheels of work pressure and resulting stress, to unwind and refresh ourselves we often need to travel. There is a travel concept for every different preference. Thus terms like “cuisine tourism”, “ethnic tourism”, “health tourism”, etc continue to be popular.
Just with this increasing multiplicity, travel businesses are increasingly becoming sophisticated. Unlike the previous travel businesses that used to consider websites as the only needful for a digital footprint, today’s travel companies first and foremost need to cater to their services with standalone apps featuring all the UI elements for the travelers to make interactions. Any travel app development company needs to keep in mind the changing specter of travel apps and their value-driven features.
Here through this blog post we are going to explain why travel businesses need to have mobile apps for their brand and what are the key features they need to focus upon.
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Why Travel And Tourism Businesses Invest in Apps?
It is understandable that the smartphone flaunting travelers of today need to interact with travel businesses more with standalone travel apps and a lot of travel app ideas than with other means. Let us mention here some of the specific reasons for the travel and tourism businesses to opt for mobile apps.
A Custom Solution
Personalisation of the user experience us in high demand across all app niches and it is no different from the travel apps. As the needs and requirements of the travelers widely vary, there is more scope of personalization with travel apps than other app niches.
Marketing Destinations Better
Travel apps help marketing the destinations better thanks to an array of features available on the mobile device. For example, a travel guide app can feature a very interactive map of the Louvre museum and the famous architectures of Barcelona and help travelers to get the best of these iconic destinations.
Facilitating Easy Booking
Most of the travel businesses basically depend on booking for generating revenue and this is where booking features can be greatly helpful. Through a mobile app a user can easily browse destinations, filter options, choose the ideal booking option and make payment.
Voice Interaction On The Go
Thanks to mobile apps travelers can also interact by using the voice command and get things done faster while on the go. From booking a ticket to checking the booking queue to get real-time help regarding a new place in the city, voice interaction makes things simpler for travelers.
Getting An Immersive View of a Destination
While travel apps always come with robust high-quality images and cool videos describing the places of interest, the latest Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are further helping to extend the visual experience to immersive one.
Most Important Features For Travel App Development
Travel business involves a few features and industry-specific attributes that other businesses terribly lack. The developers need to have a clear idea about the most important features that no travel app can be built without. There are also certain features that have become extremely crucial in the modern context.
A User Account With Flexibility To Social Signup or Guest Login
In most cases a travel app works like a ready to use tool for the travellers and most travellers continue to use an app if they find the app to be interesting and needful. This is why it is important to tune the pitch of the app with the user in a personal way.
While user signup is extremely important, always make things smoother and flexible by allowing social media signup or guest login. Even while the user needs to fill a form for signup, don’t force them to fill more than two or three fields.
A Search Option With Useful Filters
Providing a search tool for users to get access to the content they need is extremely important. Make the search further easier and entertaining by providing a number of filter options. This is particularly essential for booking apps in which users always need to search by different timings, rate, comfort level, value-added features, etc.
Geolocation and Navigation
This is probably the most elementary feature of any travel app. Travel app needs to teach the location and the geolocation of the travelers on a continuous basis. Travel apps need to show the travelers right routes and help to navigate easily in any place. Besides allowing travelers to navigate online with the help of geolocation features, offline access to navigation across places is a key feature of sophisticated travel apps.
Offline Access
What happens when landing in a distant land a traveler simply without any access to the internet cannot get in touch with his hotel, the nearby restaurant or the attraction? Well, the unavailability of Internet connectivity and resulting difficulties in connecting the facilities is common to many travelers.
The offline access can really help in this regard. The offline access allows a travel app to work even without any internet connection. There are already certain highly sophisticated apps that allow easier offline access to app content and features including navigation and geolocation.
Inbuilt Itinerary Creator
One of the biggest challenges that most travelers need to deal with is about managing the travel itinerary. In most touristy destinations like Paris or London or Bangkok, creating a priority list of where to visit first and how to take a tour around the city to get maximum from the available time us really a challenge for travelers. This is where an inbuilt travel itinerary creator feature can really help.
Apart from generating an itinerary, a travel app also should inform about the destinations in detail along with the hidden gems around the locations. The same app should also inform about the typical challenges, requirements, timing, and cost of visiting various places.
Weather Forecasting
It is a common habit for many winter travelers to check for snowfall before heading for hilly places or locations getting a huge share of snowfall. It is also common for leisure travelers to stay alert about potentially bad weather such as approaching storms. This is why giving weather information through a travel app has become so popular a feature these days. It offers a lot of additional values along with the regular travel features and content travel app that comes loaded with.
Conclusion
A travel app can now offer a lot more value than traditional travel websites. Whether you hire an iOS or Android app developer, these value additions are important to take into consideration. The mobile apps for travel businesses have come with a powerful value proposition that outshines regular travel offerings.
