In this modern world, mobile app development for travel business is considered as one of the smartest approaches. Apart from helping people find hotels, flights, and restaurants, it just makes their experience all the way to the top. Right from assisting users in finding best places for vacations to helping them get a complete customized holiday planned, finding restaurants with favourite dishes to best luxurious rooms, the travel industry has gone a step ahead by growing rapidly and quickly through the platform of the mobile application.
Popular Travel App Trends
of travelers ‘nearly always’ or ‘sometimes’ use a smartphone app to book flights
of business travelers have used social media channels to book a flight
of business travelers have used voice assistants during a trip
of Gen-Z millennial want more visual search functionality
of travel brands are investing in voice in 2019
of travel brands are investing in predictive analytics in 2019
Benefits of a Travel App
- Collaborative platform
- Instant availability
- Increase Revenue
- Attract More Customer
- Enhance Customer Support
- Potent Marketing Tools
- Reduce Paperwork
- Simple Transaction
Features to have in your Travel App
Tracking
This is one of the key features you should be having for your travel application. This helps track the user searches for planning a trip or other things on the go. In case your application is missing this feature, your app will not be good enough for anything.
Push Notification
It is possible to get quick updates on your mobile application by effectively making use of AI technology. When it comes to making some crucial decisions, push notifications seem to play a very important role. Such kind of notifications offers stories on places to hang out, news, any accidents, etc.
Forecasting
Something that your app can do for the travel planners is to offer them some future predictions. Add in features like weather and climatic forecasting in the travel app so as to help the travellers plan their trip in advance. Getting a climatic update of the location or the place you plan to visit will help you understand the atmosphere of the place before you actually go on the trip.
Smart Booking Services
People who are using such apps are much educated and the percentage of such travellers is ever increasing. Such people spend time on them understanding different travel plans, comparing the plans and then finally making the booking. This means when you are developing the mobile application for your travel business, you need to add in the smart booking services definitely. Such services will do a number of things like set reminders, compare prices, notify on a timely manner, review statistics, categorize plans and do the rest which can make the app stay out in the market.
Translator
Your app must be easily compatible with different languages. This will perform various functions for the customers and leave a good impact on them. It will help the travellers to know the places in a better way as well as help with other things.
Miscellaneous Booking Facility
Your travel booking app must be having facilities for flight booking, hotel booking, car booking and similar ones which are possessed by the other top apps in the niche. Having such facilities will help you turn your app successful in the market.
Social Sharing
People have turned tech-savvy today and are interested in sharing pictures, short stories and videos on social media as they are addicted to sharing posts. Just by using your travel application, you can stay in touch with social media and express yourself. It can help take suggestions from social media, refer to friends and even ask for help.
Strong Payment Gateway
You can make your application rich by opting for strong security measures. You should be offering mobile payment services which can allow the users to make and accept payments with ease. Again, the increased use of net banking and plastic money has contributed effectively towards the digitalization of payments. Some of the popular payment interfaces that have been used by apps are Apple Pay, PayPal, Google wallet, etc.
Feedback System
The best way to conduct business is by knowing what customers expect from you and so you should start learning from their queries. A good business will put in more efforts to work towards customer relationship and reply to their queries on time. So if you are new in this business, then you should definitely come up with this feature in your app.
Offers and Discounts
In this modern world, for every business sales is about discounts, offers, and catchy attractions. When we talk about things in terms of a travel business, discounts and offers can come up for flight booking, planning the itinerary, ordering food on the app, etc. Some even come up with discounted offers which can be used during the next booking. So this feature remains as the favourite of the entrepreneurs who are trying to make money and boost sales all the while building a strong relationship with customers.
AR, voice and visual search among the mobile travel trends to dominate in 2019
How Much does it Cost to Develop a Travel App
A number of factors can influence the cost of developing a travel app. The same has been explained below:
Different Features & its Complexity
The time that will be required to carry out the development of the mobile app for the travel business depends on the kind of functions you want to include in there as well as the complexity that they possess. Again, the complexity of such functions will decide the number of members you want on your development team and the man-hours that you will need to spend in there.
Before you get started, you need to decide the scope of the project first. You need to get answers to a few questions to know what you need. The questions can be like how many features you plan to implement in the app, whether you need to directly develop the app or come up with the MVP first.
You should have an understanding that when you go for crucial features in your app, you will have to make use of cutting edge technologies or go for expert help. This will increase the cost of app development. Some of the features that we are discussing here are animation, voice recognition, real-time synchronization, etc.
Use of Platform
If you plan to develop a native app for your travel business for Android or iOS platforms, you should keep in mind that you will end up spending more money and need to wait for a longer time. However, you need to know that it greatly increases the quality of the developed app. It can take more time and money to develop an app for Android compared to iOS, but then again, the apps developed for Android gets three times more popularity compared to the iOS ones. So if you are not sure about which platform to choose for your app development, you can choose Android for a safer side.
Integration
It is actually a challenge to integrate the mobile application and most of the app developers face this issue. In order to make that happen, they need to open the existing infrastructure of the service or site to the new mobile channel. They also need to minimize the changes that are made to the back-end infrastructure. Because of a number of release cycles and QA, the process of app integration turns out to be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Again you will need to put in more development effort in terms of integration with more number of data sources getting added up and this will definitely boost up the cost too.
Authorization Method
A good number of mobile applications out there need the user to first login to use it. Currently, many mobile applications have already started to make use of social media logins and it is even considered a standard. It is important to know that it is considered a reliable method both for app operators and users. This helps the app to create a profile of the user easily and in the future, it helps create better opportunities through personalization. No doubt developing such a user login is not that issue for the app. However, it can be time-consuming and this can cost money when it comes to developing the app.
It is very important to keep in mind that mobile app users will not be having access to the internet as always and so the device and app may go offline. This way, the app will not be able to gauze the difference between different app users. For the same, it would be wise enough to think about offline authentication.
You can even increase the security of the app by going for dual-factor authentication. This comes in the form of a code that the user gets to enter when making a login attempt and such code comes in the form of a message or over a telephone call.
Keeping the importance of the app in progress, you can consider some expensive methods of authentication like retina scan or fingertip scan. However, you need to get experts on work to achieve it and this means you will need to make higher investments.
Synchronization in Real-time
Time really matters in this modern-day life and so actions that are real-time in nature really matters. So for mobile app development, real-time synchronization remains a crucial thing. So faster the information can be received and processed, it will become easy for the users to take action quickly. In short, real-time synchronization for the app will help make meaningful actions and will help the user make better decisions on time.
Whenever the user gets a notification about a special offer, he or she can promptly book a flight or order the tour for the lowest price possible. He or she can find the route at an unknown location or even send messages to the family or friends in a better way.
It is possible to stream data to different clients by using specific technologies and contemporary solutions. Based on why you want to have real-time synchronization in the app, it can cost you more money, time and effort.
Selecting a Travel app Development Company
Choosing the Travel app development vendor plays critical role in cost to develop Travel app. However you can also do this in multiple ways such as
- Going with In-House Developers
- Outsource the whole project to a App Development Company
- Work with freelancer developers(Inhouse as well as remote)
- Consult a company with expertise in Travel IT Solutions
You can select any one of the above mentioned options with respect to cost. However keep in mind that its not necessary that lower cost is always a best option. As there are number of factors depend on the success of your app, you should not compromise on factors like experience of developer, performance, time to develop, and others.
Popular Travel Apps
- Google Maps
- TripIT
- RoadTrippers
- LoungeBuddy
- Airbnb
- Hopper
- MMT
- Hotel Tonight
- Priority Pass
- FlightAware
- Calm
- SkyScanner
Wrapping it up
So if you are planning to develop a travel app for your business, then by this time you must have understood what all you need to make this happen in a better way. Even if developing such an app can be an expensive and time-consuming affair, no doubt you will be able to reap its good benefits in the end.
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