Making Progress on Eurotripr 💪
Just wanted to post a little note to maintain accountability as I add to my neverending project Eurotripr.com.
I am moving forward with what seems like an unending list of countries and cities and adding content and travel costs and details to each. It is a slow grind and I am sure there are APIs that might automate this for me, and I will be reexamining the possibility of these soon.
At the moment I now have all the countries in Europe added to Eurotripr, with brief descriptions, general travel costs and travel details for each. Pages that display all the countries or cities at once load super SLOW, so I have to work on performance for these pages, but it's a step in the right direction.
Adding City data and then Attractions/Things to DO in each location is next.
I lost all my city an Things to Do images this week when I tried to refactor my image upload functionality 😞 and am in process of reuploading the images (that will now auto crop & resize when uploaded) for these destinations.
My goal is to have AT LEAST the Top 10 cities per the Top 10 Countries in EUrope (based on tourist popularity), and the Top 5-10 Attractions in each city. It's a LOT of data input, but I really hope when all said and done, it can be useful to some people planning trips to Europe.
I also will be adding some favorite trip itineraries this upcoming week so there are some sample trips users will be able to get inspiration from. I have an itinerary builder in place, but it's behind a paywall for Members.
I'm also looking to incorporate the OpenAI API into my project soon too.
The amount of work is staggering, but I am making progress again a little each day.
Hey! Cool project. What's the main value proposition of signing up for Eurotripr?
I realized I didn't really answer your question in my original reply:
The real value prop for Eurotripr would be inspire and help first-time travelers plan trips to Europe.
No matter what features I build or what data I display, or how I display it, at the end of the day, I want to inspire more people to plan more trips to Europe. I want to give them the information that I wish I had on my first trip to Europe so they are confident in planning and traveling around where ever they go in Europe.
Especially for Americans, since we typically have less time to travel, but also for budget-minded travelers who want to ensure their dollars are not wasted.
the hope is to
build out a community of people traveling around Europe. So the value would be being part of that community and connecting with other people traveling there: create IRL local meetups, chat with other members about on-the-ground costs/accommodations, and help planning individual custom Itineraries.
Custom Itinerary building. I have a ton of Itineraries I need to (manually) add to the site to give visitors some ideas of trips to go on. But I want to allow members to plan their own itinerary with the app so they can customize as they desire. Then they can have the itinerary in their pocket.
I want to EVENTUALLY add hostel and local tour bookings to the site. I would have the price inflated for non-members (10-15%), but members would be able to book at 'cost'. Most would probably book offsite, but It is a additional I want to add if people use the site.
A place to track your European travels. The member profile allows members to track the countries and cities they have visited. Not a big deal, but just a small things for those that want to track such things in the app.
Remove Ads from the view. Maybe not a big deal for some, but a small convenience to those that hate seeing ads on the site.
Once all the data has been input to the site, I want to create filters that allow users to find the perfect places and itineraries for their dream trips. I am guessing that a lot of users will have a lot of various 'wants' and 'don't wants' for trips and places they want to visit. So I am envisioning I will add a lot of various filters, then I can allow SOME to be used for free, but members would have access to all filtering capabilities.
Finally (for now), once I have all my itineraries in place, I will probably limit how much of the itinerary can be viewed or limit/randomize the itineraries shown to non-members. So basically SAMPLES of what is available for members. Then members would have full access to dozens or hundreds of pre-made travel itineraries.
Newest idea: I want to build out a AI trip planner. But This seems a bit daunting. Then I could allow non-users to have access to it, but limit the prompts they can use to generate a itinerary or limit the number of itineraries they can generate. But members would have more access to such a tool.