Opportunity: Every
year, millions of tourists travel from all over the world to the City of
Orlando to visit its world-class attractions and experiences. Although most
tourists travel from within the United States, there is an increasing amount of
tourist from international countries, especially Brazil and Argentina. Most
visitors come to Orlando as part of a convention group or with their families. When
someone has decided to go to Orlando, they usually have a hotel reservation,
flight booking, and a rental car prepared months in advance. Once they actually
get to Orlando, they have to decide and plan what they are going to do with
their precious time. In Central Florida alone, there are over 45 attractions to
choose from and most of them are not well-known outside the state of Florida.
There is currently no way to easily plan which attractions will be visited and
also no way of knowing which attractions will be entertaining for everyone traveling
together.
Orlando has been continuously expanding over the past decade
in both residential and commercial zones, which has brought increasing amounts
of people and new businesses to the city. This upward growth has ultimately led
to an increase in the tourism industry which makes it harder for tourists to
make the best of their time. Currently, tourists are relying on their own
knowledge to plan their vacations. This leads to people who are not able to
make the most of their time and who come to Orlando to visit only the major theme
parks that are known across the nation. This window of opportunity will always
exist because Orlando will always rely on tourism as its main industry.
Innovation: The innovation
that will be at the backbone of this new venture will essentially be a new “vacation
planning” software that can be accessed through a mobile application or
website. Users will first create an account so all their information can be
saved and accessed from any device. After creating this account, every person
in the family or group will take personality/interest quiz. This quiz will be
composed of questions that ask of the preferences of each user based on scales
from one to ten. Using this information, the website will notify the users
which experiences/ attractions will best suit everyone in the family and how
much time they should spend there. A specific calendar will be displayed for
the days of the vacation and users can drag the attraction onto the day they wish
to go there. The calendar will automatically calculate how long the user will
be there for and how long it will take to get to travel to the next location
afterwards. Users will then be able to purchase all of their tickets together
online. This will not only save them money, but also time by keeping away those
pesky will call lines and allowing tickets to be printed at home or saved to
their smartphones.
Revenue will mainly be made through two services. Most of
the revenue will come from advertisements on the website. Every advertisement
displayed on the site will be limited to attractions and experiences in the
vacation city. This means that users will only be seeing relevant options
instead of their most recent amazon search while they are planning their vacations.
A smaller portion of revenue will come from a small convenience fee added to
every online purchase.
Venture Concept: This
innovation will specifically be designed and customized for the city of Orlando
and will be called “Experience Orlando”. This website will allow guests to plan
out every attraction they want to visit while knowing that everyone in the
group will enjoy the entire vacation. Nothing like this has ever been created before,
therefore, customers will not have to switch to this service, but they will
need to log on for the first time.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteWow! Your venture concept has come a long way since the beginning of class. You seemed to have refined the fine details. I really like the idea of the personality / interest assessment that you have added. It might take some fine algorithm writing to get a program like that off the ground, but it is definitely doable. The only thing I would suggest is having your site set-up so that users can still chose their own places to visit. For example, if your program suggested I go to a place that I have already been to, I would like to have the option to change it. Also, if I don’t like the plan suggested to me at all, then it would be nice to have the option to go through and select all of my own destinations. I know that the “backbone” of your business is this unique innovative software, but you don’t want to lose those pesky customers that want to do things their way. Instead, offer them both options. Great job overall, Chris!
Hey Chris, I like the calendar aspect that automatically calculates how long the user will be there for and how much time they should spend there based on the personality quiz. Also, I agree with John about the idea of an option for users to manually choose a few of their own destinations if for some reason they disagree with some of the recommendations from the personality quiz for some reason. It probably would not take a notable amount of resources to integrate that option and would allow for you to satisfy more customers than you would have otherwise. It seems that your venture would be based mostly on analytics and algorithm resources, which I find interesting.
ReplyDeleteHi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI think you have really found a way to cater to the tourism community-- one that brings in so much money each and every year. I think that you have really learned how to personalize vacations for families- especially with your idea of having an assessment on the application. I know for my family-- this might not be the app we would use, since usually the people paying for the vacation (aka my parents) have the final call. But I could absolutely see this as something my friends and I would use together when we travel together. Maybe link this to facebook and have the option of planning trips within your social networks? For example--sometimes when my sorority wants to choose which theme park to visit we take a poll on facebook. If there was this type of feature on the app that integrated social networks that would be very useful! Great job!
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI think you have a great idea to simplify and streamline the vacation planning process. I think that the greatness in your idea comes from having a personalized (the personality test) process for which the customer gets their attractions which is very different than most travel sites online. I think on thing you could do to improve it is to show other attractions in Orlando and try to get the user to spend more time in Orlando and thus more time with your service. Great job!