May 3, 2010
Organizing travel through wisdom of crowd
I remember in my school there was a painting which had two horses running through the woods and had a caption “Each must find it’s own way”. However, this blog post differs in someway and here’s how.
Last week I was in Venice and explored the city a lot by walking. Apart from hundreds of eager tourists, several museums/ churches I also found abundant businesses and as a tourist sometimes you have good experience dealing with them, while sometimes leaves a sour taste in your mouth (in my previous trip to Florence I ran into a horrible restaurant ripping off 48 euro for some for some trashy food). While spending good 3 days here, I thought a day would come when every tourist would do something mentioned below.
There would be “tracker” sitting on the phones of every tourist (yes and I am hoping that international data plan would be very very cheap or may be free 
). Now this service would anonymously track the path of the traveler. This application would do a lot of data mining on Best places to see in the given time constraint, restaurants to eat, mashup events, and not to mention hotels to stay and bars to hop into. The traveler can certainly attach experiences and put reviews for the activities/ businesses they dealt with. Services like Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr can be integrated. It would also help the local authorities to plan and increase the infrastructure to serve the tourists in a better fashion. The possibilities are endless.
Social networking is not the main purpose of this application. What people “generally” do, is what it will tell.
However, the success of this depends on two important things (out of several other roadblocks)
- The willingness of the tourist to let the real time information published (even though it can be completely anonymous)
- Free international data roaming plan
May be someone is already working on making it work for making the life of tourists an easy experience.