Tourism app ideas: Trendy concepts for lucrative travel apps

The world these days is heating up the competition among travel and tourism that startups and SMEs need tourism app ideas to advance their advantage against rivals.

Every travel and hospitality business needs a model to follow, of which it decides what function should be attached son the mobile app development roadmap. Evidently, in the digitalization era of travel, having a mobile app is a pivotal element to survive in the highly competitive market. So, did you ever ask about how other businesses perform better than others even when they have the same business model?

In fact, any minor advancement might make an influential impact on business performance. Accordingly, value ideas commonly came from the actual concept available in the market. That’s why exploring tourism app ideas is never been an outdated demand. In this article, we suggest six concepts for mobile app development within the tourism industry. Also, we indicate a significant successful travel app case study to inspire you with future strategies.

Mobile apps for travel and tourism

Despite the adverse impact of COVID19, the global travel and tourism industry has still contributed a considerable share to the global economy. Evidently, the direct contribution of travel and tourism business to the global economy accounted for roundly US$ 3 Trillion, while its total contribution reached US$ 9.2 Trillion.

Tour and travel software- mobile app development

As a type of tour and travel software, travel mobile apps currently lead the market due to the fact that travelers are more prefer using smartphones for their trips rather than desktop or laptop. Evidently, 60% of smartphone users have at least one travel mobile app on their phone, according to e-Marketer.

In fact, using a travel app means uplifting the travel experience. Users could use the app for multiple application as ticket booking, hotel reservation, destination browsing, and more. In the midst of a digital transformation in travel and tourism, adopting an app is fundamental for all services providers. With an app, travel firms could increase their presence in the market, reaching millions of smartphone users and stay ahead of their competitors.

Travel app case study

Among several examples, we listed here three successful apps with different travel app ideas that might inspire you.

1. Airbnb – “Uber version” for accommodation sharing

If Uber is an extremely successful unicorn company for ride-sharing, Airbnb refers to a typical example of wealthy travel apps for room sharing. Basically, Airbnb is a complex accommodation marketplace that landlords could host a virtual store for leasing their available properties. Currently, Airbnb host over 81,000 locations around the world.

In 2021, adverse impacts of the global pandemic cause a significant decrease in terms of the audience’s size of Airbnb. However, this app has still owned a large number of users with 150 million usual users worldwide.

Some outstanding features from Airbnb apps, which make the app successful:  

• Last-minute accommodation search for discounts and urgent renting  
• Save features for preferred room and location  
• Group trips or on-click trip planning for a group of travelers  
• Accommodation booking engine, confirmation, and payment placing  
• In-app messaging and notification  
• Booking reminders and real-time alerts  
• Rating place, rooms, and landlord  

2. Culture trips – design for exploring culture journey  

As experienced travel has been rising as an exciting type of tourism, Culture Trip takes advantage of the first company exploring this market. This app is built to gather unique information about a location from people who authentically live it and love it. In fact, the Culture Trip app refers to be a mixed type between tour operator software and travel portal. It offers an inspirational travel guide for travel trip planning.

Some typical features of Culture Trip, attracting users:  

• Travel content browsing by location
• Travel itineraries planner
• Booking engines for accommodation and tours
• Virtual experiences sources: painting, cooking, mediation, and more

Unfortunately, after 10 years of installment, Culture Trip indicated its drawback, which should be improved further, including duplicated content, poor itinerary building features, and shortage of story verification process.

3. Booking.com – Online travel booking  

The Booking.com app is well-known as a comprehensive booking engine, mainly for hotel and accommodation reservations. Besides, users currently could book tours, tourist attraction tickets, or vehicles for travel right in the app. Launching in 1996, Booking.com has still held its leading position in the market, with over 28 million listings for 150,000 destinations across the world. Apart from Airbnb made for a private landlord, Booking.com mainly focuses on registered hotels, resorts, homestay, etc.

Outstanding features of Booking.com, which made it stand out:  

• Filter searching for types of properties in one location
• Advance searching for appropriate needs
• Booking management and notification
• Multi currencies support in payment

Travel and Tourism app ideas

If you plan to develop a new travel and tourism app or simply execute the next phase of your current work, some below suggestions could help. 

Travel and leisure app as social media platform

Idea introduction: a social networking app for travelers might not a direct commercial platform for purchasing and selling, it plays the role of communication channel for travel expeditions. Accordingly, travelers could ask questions, search for help, group up, review, share experiences, and more. Also, this app creates a new space for travel firms to build their brand and executing PR activities.

You can handily find some similar tourism app ideas throughout the market, as Travello, and Foursquare as examples. Accordingly, to be successful, you should stay focus instead of building a basic app. For instance, developing a travel app as video-based sharing or VR-based content. Besides, you could consider an app with a clear and comprehensive process to publish content, instead of mass content publishment, which emphasized the accuracy across your platform

Tour guide travel app: Destination searching

An app used for providing reviews, ratings, and valuable details of a particular location like TripAdvisor could be a good tourism app idea. It enables users to browse and find details about their planned destinations, written by other users. In which, they can save preferences or add comments for their choice.

Also, this app could also be used to provide tips, tour suggestions, or luggage guidelines for travelers. Additionally, to stand out from other tour guide travel app available in the market, you should add VR technology as the 360-degree views for destinations or real-time street views into the app. Those features could help business improve their credibility, then driving more traffics and engagements.

Languages assistant travel app

The language barrier refers to be on top of challenges faced by travelers in a new place. In this case, visitors have to hire a tour guide and let him go with them during their journey. It might cause some difficulties in terms of inconvenient and costly options for travelers. Alternatively, a language converter app could be a beneficial software solution. With the technological advancement in voice recording and AI translators, the language assistant app could instantly translate your words into local languages and vice versa.

Local public transportation app

Local transportation refers to be a significant challenge to travelers when coming to a new place. In the past, visitors Depen heavily on taxi services or temporary car drivers as means of transportation. In fact, it was costly and caused the total travel budget to be unreasonable. In Asia, in which countries do not have a city rail system, travelers need to use taxies, which could occur some moral hazards (I.e unrevealed trip costs).

The current trends suggest that local firms or authorities could develop a local public transport app, covering software services like ride-sharing, bicycle-to-fire system, bus, and city train. This app aims to provide information, issues ticket, and a rote guide for travel using local public transport.

Travel Deal listing app

An assistant app for auto-finding nearby deals would be an outstanding idea that travelers would be willing to download. Evidently, despite some limited luxury trip participants, almost all travelers expect to reduce their costs and save money during traveling. Most users are attracted by deals and discounts in their destinations, especially restaurants deals, event ticket discounts, entrance gifts, or related items. The deal listing apps could execute deal integrations from multi-source, displaying right on your apps.

Car/vehicle rental app ideas

The idea of building a tourism app platform for a traveler could rent and pay for a travel vehicle might not be a new concept, but be still prospective. A reason for that could be localism. In fact, each destination or area follows a different transformation system, which leads to using the same platform for vehicle rental activities is seemingly not a good idea. Instead, this app should be customized based on location. In other words, local companies should have their own car rental apps to maximize their potential.

For example, taxi brands could promote their mobile app development projects to build unique rental services, including diverse car models to be rented as SUVs, micros, sports, motors, etc. Accordingly, the Car Rental app could also offer both taxi drivers and self-service vehicles to users.

In conclusion, despite the highly competitive market for the travel and tourism industry, it still has room for appropriate tourism app ideas to be shine. As the top outsourcing software development companies in Vietnam, Adamo Software is available to help you capture for the next projects.