Context
Prior to the prevalence of the Internet, trip planning is largely associated with tour agencies who are experts in this domain. It was difficult to plan a trip without easy access to travel information, not to mention the insecurity and unsettling prospect of being lost in a foreign land. Yet springing forward to today's context, F&E travelling is increasingly the method of choice for travellers to conduct their trip. However, F&E travellers tend to rely on disjointed avenues to fulfil their research, transactional and organisational needs, which compromise on the ease of planning their trip.
What's TravelMates?
It's a travel hub for Free & Easy (F&E) travellers which my team and I designed for a service innovation module. This page showcases a revamped version of the design I did many years back.
TravelMates serves as a single platform that allows F&E travellers to consolidate flights, accommodations and all other trip activities in a single itinerary, as well as introduce social elements to help travellers find companions with similar interests, communicate with fellow trip members and share information before and after the trip.
Search for Hotels, Flights & Trip Activities
Allows users to search for information on TravelMates by entering a few keywords and selecting the categories of interest. Relevant results will be displayed in a list of activities ranked by relevance, and sorted by popularity, price or name.
Activity Information Page
Trip Itinerary Planner
Allows users to select and organise activities by simply dragging and dropping activities from the search list into specific timeslots in the schedule. We also thought that the backend system should actively help to ensure that there are no clashes in activity timings while multiple versions of such itineraries may be saved for future reference.
Travellers may also choose to share any of these itineraries with the online community or to their accounts in other social media platforms. Conversely, they may also reference and import itineraries shared by other travellers to the itinerary planner as a base for their own trip planning purposes.
To allow other travellers to join this trip, travellers may also opt to make this trip public, by invitation only, or totally private. At any point in time thereafter, users can receive updates from fellow trip members who have joined their trips as well as make comments or add activities to the shared itinerary.
Review Trip Activities & Travel-Related Content
