I’ve recently completed a travel planning MVP called Itinographer. The idea is that you plan your trip in the desktop web app and download it to the iPhone app before you travel.
I got into smartphones and GPS in 2004 when PocketPC Phone Edition came out. Over the years I made some apps that tracked multi-day mountain treks and plotted them on Google Maps. I was going to do an iPhone version but the first iPhones didn’t support background location tracking so I worked on something else. Last year I wanted to do another mobile app and so decided to go back to my interest in travel tech.
At this stage I’m looking for user validation. I’m trying to get users through paid advertising, though Google pulled my ad saying my landing page violated it’s policies, not sure why. I was a bit disheartened when I saw the Hacker News post saying that travel planning software is the most common bad startup idea.
I would be interested in what people think of my take on this software genre, what problems you encounter when planning trips and what software you currently use.