Today’s travel experience cannot be separated from the Innovative travel apps that accompany every nook and corner of the traveler’s journey. When you travel to a distant place, a good travel app often plays the role of a problem solver and a guiding companion. No wonder app developers and app entrepreneurs, travel apps draw so much attention.
If a tourism business wants to establish its footprint in the industry with a lovable solution, there cannot be a better way to achieve this than building a unique travel app. While the popularity of travel apps continues to rise, not all apps in this niche are equally successful. App developers now need to brainstorm many unique travel app ideas to find the one that can impact the audience.
Whether you are a tourism company or a development firm looking for travel app ideas with success potential, it is essential to have an overview of the best app categories for the travel niche. Here we will explain some of the most popular and effective travel app ideas for our user audience.
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An App for Booking Accommodations
Among the most popular travel app categories, we can refer to booking apps for hotels and other accommodations such as guest houses, homestays, hostels, etc. You must have heard about Airbnb, the booking app that took the travel experience to a new level. There are also smaller but impressive success stories to inspire app developers to develop tourism apps.
Remember, hotel and accommodation booking apps must offer options across different price brackets, comfort level locations, and value-added offerings. On top of that, the app must provide some value-added features that travelers find useful.
Travel Itinerary App
People like to make well-planned travel that does not create holes in their pockets; hence, itinerary travel apps are so popular worldwide. Many people end up canceling trips after seeing considerably higher travel expenses. This is where a planned itinerary focusing on cost savings can be helpful.
An app focused on creating a budget itinerary can help travelers save additional days so that journey time can be reduced, or it can suggest even alternate routes. Such a travel app can also offer a variety of deals and trip discounts ensuring further cost savings for travelers.
A Social Media Platform or Travellers
Travelers love to interact, ask fellow travelers questions and give helpful information on journeys and trips from their own experiences. All these posted on travel forums make a community of like-minded travelers. We can find a great platform with TripAdvisor, but it is too big and global. App developers can now build smaller, neat mobile travel forum apps accommodating fellow journeymen with the same interests.
Several apps have similar traveler forums, so you cannot help but focus on a particular travel category or niche. To add more value to the app, you can add reviews and ratings, small videos, itineraries, GPS maps, etc.
Virtual Tour Guide
The virtual tour guide is an exceptional travel app niche that always shines with demand. While virtual tour guides are generally believed to offer travel guides to help travelers visit destinations all over the globe, you need to develop some innovative features to engage travelers and stay ahead of other similar apps in the market.
Apart from adding a lot of attractions across different interest areas and popularity metrics, the app can also integrate Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver an immersive experience to tourists visiting numerous travel attractions. Top app developers India decks up these tour guide apps with value additions by focusing on local transportation and less-known food and travel destinations with a detailed guide to reach them.
Bus & Local Cab Booking App
It is common knowledge that travelers can now book bus travel tickets just like booking flights. But what about allowing people to book bus tickets for all journeys, including shorter and long cross-country routes? Yes, much more comprehensive coverage can make your app further exceptional.
But don’t just stop with bus ticket booking. App developers can also allow the same app to book local cabs and other transports like boats for long and short trips. While doing all these, it is essential to give attention to details that help travelers plan and calculate trip costs.
App for Instant Foreign Language Help
App developers cannot stay aloof from the burgeoning app category when they explore the tourism industry for their next successful app project. A travel app for foreign languages helps not just works as a virtual translator and allows users to develop language skills for their travels in different countries.
Apart from the multilingual support to translate text and speech in various languages, the app can also provide visual clues to different objects and activities through images. The same app can also guide various local customs across destinations.
Multi-Currency Payment App
Payment apps are almost ubiquitous in our everyday life. Still, despite their popularity, they are often not effective in long-distance journeys, particularly in countries with other currencies and economic rules. This is why a multi-currency payment app that can support transactions worldwide can be a great idea for app developers to pursue.
Besides allowing different money exchange and transaction options through the app, you can also offer a variety of value-added features ranging from currency converter and calculator, travel and domestic debit cards to detailed guide on custom and excise rules and transaction fees.
A Global Guide for Souvenirs
Travelers often become confused when deciding the best souvenirs they can purchase and bring home within their budget. They often end up paying for cheap cliches at a highly overrated price, and when they realize the experience makes a bad memory of the trip.
You can make a souvenir guide app focusing globally on specialties from famous and remote places. When traveling to distant corners of the earth and favorite places, people often have a lot of choices for souvenirs and gifts to bring back home. On the other hand, choosing a souvenir that suits the option of a near and dear one is equally a difficulty many people realize on trips. This is where the souvenir guide on the smartphone screen comes to travelers’ aid.
Washroom Finding App
After a long journey with tired legs, most travelers rush to the nearest washroom they find. But finding the nearest washroom is not so easy in many places, especially for newcomers. This is when an app offering a guide to finding the nearest washroom can help. Sounds unique and bizarre? Well, you can count on this app idea to appeal to travelers if you execute the idea right.
Over to You
Since in our time p everything in life has turned to apps, travelers cannot think of a smooth travel experience without embracing travel apps. Travel apps are of numerous types, as the above description show, but you need to choose the one that you find most appealing based on your own travel experience and people’s feedback. To evaluate your app idea, discussing it in popular traveler forums and with your Instagram followers first is always advisable.
Juned Ghanchi is the CEO of IndianAppDevelopers, a top mobile app development company in India with a global presence in the USA. He explores all things in the software industry and oversees company growth as CEO.