Travel App Development: Everything You Need to Know

Despite the devastating initial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020, the travel and tourism industry is slowly picking up again with millions of people safely traveling across the globe, keeping social distancing and travel restrictions in mind. Travel agencies are now able to help people in their tour planning to let them travel without worrying about flight schedules, accommodation, ticket bookings, and even car rentals. And in this digital age, this can all be done through a single click.

This means that if you are in the travel business you must have a strong digital presence: it is something your customers will expect from you. Travel app development helps you facilitate your customers like a pro, which is crucial in retaining your customer base in a highly competitive era. 

So here are some tips on developing a travel app for your business in 2021.

How to Make a Successful Travel App

Developing a travel app may not be rocket science but it's not a walk in the park too. There are a few do’s and don’ts to make it successful. There are already many travel apps with interesting and unique features that you can analyze to develop a basic idea. A successful travel app consists of several features that help customers such as:

Geographical Location

You cannot separate maps from travels: whether it’s one your tour group follows or if you want them for mobbing around separately. Traveling and tour apps should include maps and location integration. Most smartphone users opt for navigation apps while traveling. So, a feature of geolocation should be at the base of travel mobile app development. It may affect your budget and app cost, but this feature is necessary to provide your users with a better experience. 

You can integrate Google Maps API, and there are many other solutions available too now, such as TomTom, HERE, and OpenLayers, to name a few. 

Although these APIs are helpful, they do not provide the complete data you may need; Google Hotels API offers you information about accommodations but only in specific regions. There are also technology tools you may need to integrate this information are depending on your app functionalities.

Trip Planning

People consult agencies to plan their tours efficiently and expect the same from the travel apps they use. A successful travel app offers various functionalities and options to a user, such as selecting destinations, transportation, hotel booking, or even calculating travel cost, etc. These functions must integrate well with maps and other necessary data for a hassle-free user experience. Trip planning should be structural and seamless so that user can effortlessly plan out their entire itinerary.

Reservation and Booking Services

Which travel app will forego booking and reservation functionalities? None. Users want easy, online reservations of their flights, hotels, restaurants, sightseeing, commute, etc. You must integrate all of these to facilitate your customers. 

You will need a power-packed technology stack to implement these functions in travel app development such as Boolking.com, Arzoo, Orbitz, Skyscanner, smartflyer, Google Flights, etc. You have to integrate them precisely for the efficient and smooth functioning of your app.

Benefits of Developing a Travel App

It is needless to say how important it is to develop a travel app. Let’s directly jump on to some key benefits of developing it.

Instant Access

Travel mobile app development provides customers instant access to your services. They can fetch any required information without wasting time in physical consultancy. 

Digital Transformation

You can digitally transform your travel agency business by managing it through a mobile app that can collect and store client information, records, interests, etc. It also saves your time and efforts through automated business operations like bookings, billings, invoicing, etc. 

Customized Travel Planning

Travel app development enables you to provide customers with customized travel plans quickly: making it easier for a customer to plan their journey and even their shopping excursions during the trip. People can tailor their travel plans and choose pre-made tour packages. You can further promote travel packages by collecting data insights of app visitors and target your audience.

Efficient Marketing Tool 

Apps are powerful tools for marketing and promoting your services because they enable you to connect with customers and uncover their needs. This makes it easier to compile different options for them to choose from, plus the ease of booking makes customers engage with you successfully. Elevate your services further by taking feedback and implementing it.

Ways to Develop Travel Applications

Here are three ways to develop your travel app, you can choose to hire a team, use pre-made templates, or outsource the project.

• Hiring a Team

Hiring a team within your organization to develop a travel app is an option that needs monetary investment and time. Your development team will craft a travel app from scratch, tailoring in only features and functionalities required by your business model. Whereas this may be a good option, it is imperative that you choose a great team that can follow through. You should be looking for people with past experience across different industries who have considerable and provable development skills, along with app design and marketing skills. Even if you have a tech stack full of APIs and SDKs, you may get stuck, so do choose carefully and decide upon the closest estimates of development time and costs, so you can track your app development project closely.

Pros

• You have complete freedom of customization.
• It will not cost you much.
• You can choose your team according to the software required and your travel app requirements.

Cons

• You may face difficulty in finding professional developers.
• It is time-consuming.
• It requires an efficient marketing team as well.

• Using Pre-made Solutions

There are a lot of app-building platforms that provide ready-made frameworks to develop business applications. These frameworks can be utilized easily and make app creation a quick process. 

Pros

• It takes very little time to develop your app using these platforms.
• You won’t need to hire many people; hence, your travel app development cost decreases.
• You control the development process.

Cons

• Your app may be prone to bugs and errors due to a lack of quality, and lack of customization.
• You will spend more time testing frameworks that work best for you.
• Your app will not be well integrated or optimized.

• Outsourcing

Travel agency business needs a lot of attention, and various other tasks may keep you busy all day. So instead of starting a development project of your own, it is better to outsource it. There are many professional, strong development firms providing great services, such as Appedology. Hiring an outsourced option, save you the time and money of hiring a team within your own organization, because once your project is over, you will find yourself hard placed to integrate them. Also, an app development company has resources to get the job done seamlessly and many tools and people at its disposal, so it may just be the best choice as a travel app development option. Reach out to us if you want the best solution for your travel app.

Pros:

• Outsourcing is a great choice when it comes to quality and budget.
• You won’t have to worry about app marketing as most professional companies include these services.
• Rapid development process.
• Incorporate your own unique ideas to be distinctive in an already grown industry. 

Cons:

• Costlier than other development options.

Conclusion

Travel app development cost is bearable if you are certain that you want to go for it and are sure of returns. The next bit would be to try and know as much as possible about developing your app. These basic tips listed above will help you decide what's doable, before initiating a development project. Should you require any further information, you can always reach out to Appedology for any professional advice regarding your digital expedition. We are an app development company providing the best services in the digital domain. Why wait? Plan now and reach out, to get your travel app development project flying high.