SMAR’T’RAVELLER - HOLIDAY PLANNER

SYSTEM
Plan your holiday as you go

Ashish Iyer – ashish.iyer@gatech.edu

Aparna Raman – aparna.raman@gatech.edu
Radhika Parthasarathy – radhika3@gatech.edu
Vijay Ramakrishnan – v.ramakrishnan@gatech.edu

PROJECT IDEA:

Welcome to the future of holiday planning! SmarTraveller brings to the

community a fresh breath of air in the self holiday planning market. By
combining knowledge bases from the past, going the extra mile,
collaborating with existing periphery business organizations and using
holiday-planning software, SmarTraveller plans to lead the market in
providing quality services time after time. The holiday planning software
brings interactive holiday planning as close as your Android mobile phone.
Through the services offered, SmarTraveller aims to be the number one
service for any kind of holiday.

The itinerary is only a first step toward a great travel experience.

SmarTraveller uses your itinerary to build a personalized, contextually
relevant, continually updated set of directions, reference information, and
options to make the trip as enjoyable as possible.

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE:
USE CASES:

X is on a vacation at Los Angeles. He takes a look at his schedule for the day
on the SmarTraveller application on his mobile phone and sees that he has a
visit to the museum planned in the morning and a trip to San Diego Zoo
planned for the evening. The helpful weather forecast feature for each item in
the itinerary shows that it is slightly cloudy in the morning and is expected to
rain in the evening. X decides to change the order of the schedule so that the
visit to the Zoo will be done in the morning when it is cool but dry and the
museum tour will be in the evening. He switches back to the itinerary day
view and changes the items to the new order.

Y is on a trip to New York and uses the SmarTraveller application to keep

track of her itinerary. On the morning of the second day of her trip, she takes
a look at her schedule for the day and decides to check out some local
attractions in the afternoon. She clicks on the Suggestions menu and gets a
list of suggestions for tourist attractions that are near her other appointments
for the day and can be fitted into the schedule easily. She finds one that she
likes - a downtown ferry ride. She quickly checks the weather for the day and
finds it sunny. Y decides that the weather is perfect to go for the ferry ride in
the evening and goes back to it through the Tourist Attractions tab and adds
it to her schedule.

BUSINESS MODEL:

1.1 Objectives
 SmarTraveller is a small business that is aiming big. The three main
objectives are listed as follows:

1. Be the best dynamically adjusting holiday planning tool on a mobile

interface
2. Ensure profitability of the company as well as the local tourism
vendors/companies.
3. Expand the business scope to encompass more location and vendors.

1.2 Mission

In such a fast changing world, where people do not have time to “Stop and
Stare”, holidaying becomes an important aspect of life, especially when it
acts as a stress buster. Recreation is essential. SmarTraveller strives to be
the best choice for clients by helping to ease their holiday planning burden,
ensuring a worry-free and hassle-free vacation at a reasonable price.

Being in sync with the current market needs, combining technology and
trends and providing customers reliable service is the daily mission of the
SmarTraveller group.

1.3 Keys to Success

Our keys to success include the commitment to quality by every person in

the team. The group hopes to bring professionalism and to improve in the
following areas:

1. Competitive prices for the services offered

2. Assured amount of profit made on every holiday planned.
3. Market research and competition.
4. Maintaining good relation with basic reservation service offering
vendors like kayak.com, makemytrip.com etc for collaboration
purposes.

2. SERVICES

SmarTraveller aims to provide services to a wide variety of people who differ

in age, tastes and hobbies. This makes it a viable service for anyone who
wishes to go on a vacation.

We aim to provide the following services:

1. Pocket Tourist Guide

This service will guide a user based on his location and suggest tourist
places and other places of attractions. The user is free to select the
ones he likes and discard the others. The software will then plan and
allot slots to all the user selected items. It will take care of the planning
 while accepting parameters which include flight reservations, personal
work and other commitments the user might have.
2. Dynamic
Planning.
Adjusting an itinerary on the go is always a hassle and
people tend to avoid it. But in this service we plan to offer consumers
an easy way to do the same. The user would just need to enter the
event and specify details like time and importance of the event and
based on this data the software would change the itinerary and give
the user the modified plan which would take care that the user does
not miss the earlier reservations like a flight etc. The application may
need to delete another event to do so, but it would notify the user and
then proceed before doing any deletions. It also provides suggestions
based on weather and users preferences, which helps the user
accommodate uncontrollable changes in plans.

3.0 Market Segmentation

The breakdown of the market for holiday planning falls in a wide, very diverse
grouping. Individuals as well as organizations demand the services we
provide. The market segments have been broken down into Individuals, their
family and friends and age groups.

1. Individuals, their family and friends, travel agents and travel

departments

Our largest clients will be normal everyday life human beings who wish
for a break and need to plan everything from scratch. The sheer
volume of such people is what makes this section of people to be
driving our profits. These people also will have set vacation times in a
year allowing us to focus more in their behavioral predictions and
tailoring the services we provide to them.

2. Age Groups

• Under 24: Persons under the age of twenty-four (24) using a holiday
planner will be least in number. We hope to tap the early college
graduates who have begun their professional careers but have not yet
started their families. The revenues generated will range from
moderate to high, depending on the destination and volume of
students using it.

• Ages 25-55: The persons that fall into this age group are employed,
middle to upper-middle class families. The reason they choose holiday
planners is they are too busy to do it themselves. Therefore,
Smar”T”raveller will be on hand for questions, contact will be moderate
in length but occur regularly so as not to disturb the daily life of the
families. These will generate moderate revenues, with a few
generating low and high revenues.
 • Ages 56 and above: Persons over the age of 55 have reached the
turning point of life. These events will generate moderate to high
revenues depending upon the income level of the family. Their age will
give them the freedom to stay on vacation longer they will have none
or least commitment towards work and other income earning duties.
Though they might have the time to plan an entire vacation most of
them would not do so as it would be too much of a hassle. They would
prefer following an automated guide and enjoying the vacation. This
will be our critical market section.

3.1 Target Market

Our target markets are middle to upper middle class families, individuals,
couples or small organizations. We choose them as they are the ones which
would have the resources financially but little time to plan all the events.
Families need recreation and employed individuals may be overburdened
with work. Thus they generally ignore this aspect of life.

Thus SmarTraveller allows them to spend enjoyable time with friends and
family without getting their hands dirty in all the planning involved.

Cost Model:

The cost model involves cost relating to setting up the business unit ,
running costs and also the profits and the fee charged by us for
providing the services. According to certain figures , the statistics
would be as follows :

EXPENSES INCURRED :

Cost of initial deployment for setting up services: $25,000

Cost for collaboration and association with Trip Planner sites: $50,000

Marketing ( TV, Radio, online advertisements) : $50000(Advertising fees: 4.5%)

Development and Software Support : $40000 per person annually with a rough estimate of 4 - 8
people

Legal fees: $5,000

Advertising fees: 4.5%

PROFITS INCURRED :

Kayak.com - 8% of the profit Kayak makes per trip (i.e)per itinerary

Local Restaurants - 5% of the profit

Locale Specific Shopping - 10% of the profit

Tourist Attraction Deals (Ticket Deals) - 10% of the profit

REVENUE GENERATION:

Source of Revenue Type Examples

1 Users Sale  Travel Lovers
)  Business Executives
 School Tours
 Last minute Trip
Planners

2 Travel Planning sites – Sale  Dynamic extension

) kayak.com, of travel itinerary
makemytrip.com,tripit.com,
weather.com
3 Advertisement – Hotels, Sale  Locale Specific
) Restaurants and promotion Shopping
of Tourist Attraction Sites  Hotels and
Restaurants
 Travel Deals
pertaining to
specific attractions

4 Hotels and Restaurants Subscription  Up to date

) restaurant database
 Up to date
consumer database
5 Advertisements Sale  Restaurants
)  Travel Planning
websites
 Locale Specific
shopping
 Promotion of Tourist
Attraction Places
 Ticket Deals
 Car Rentals
6 Travel Agents Sale  Travel agents to compile
itineraries for clients, and
by travel departments
within businesses.

4.0 Competition

Our proposed idea is relatively new and contains no one in a direct

competition. However we would be competing to bring in this new idea as
compared to the traditional ideology. People now-a-days depend on
suggestion from friends, on the local tourism companies and help from other
miscellaneous sources while planning a trip. Rarely does anyone plan a trip
entirely in an independent manner. We find our main competitors would be:

a. Other web-based trip planning companies.

b. Local tourism companies which offer combo deals
c. People wishing to plan their own trip

4.1 Beating the Competition

Our application is mainly a live real time guide to a trip which is not offered
by web based trip planning companies.

Although local tourism companies do offer a real time guide, but their
schedules are rigid and also their trip is not tailored for an individual or a
family. It is meant for the majority and all may not have the same taste. Our
application is based on every individual or family making it personalized.

For people who wish to plan their own trip this would not be useful. But
we are right in assuming that the volume of such people will be very
small which would not impact our business.

MOCKUPS:

The basic functionalities of the system:

1) After the welcome screen, the user sees the itinerary he had
planned with holiday planner websites like kayak, makemytrip
etc.
• During the travel, when the user clicks on Day 1 of the itinerary,
it navigates to the plan for the first day. When MAP is clicked, it
 shows the location of the current coordinates.

• When the user clicks on the next feature Tourist Attraction, apart
from the normal itinerary being shown, the system will suggest
other places ( For eg. A zoo in Los Angeles might be near some
location visited in the current itinerary).
TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE – CLIENT SERVER ARCHITECTURE
SCREENSHOTS:

Welcome Screen:

Checking weather for an address:

Itinerary display by Days:
Suggestions List based on Current Itinerary:

LEARNING :
• Considering the fact that Android has an updated SDK 0.9, it takes a while
to get acclimatized to it and begin using it. There is limited help available on
the website and not enough literature, reference or tutorial available that
assists you in covering every facet of developing android applications.
Though basic tutorials do exist, they are few in number and contain very little
help for detailed design.
• All codes point to the older versions of the SDK and a lot has changed ever
since the updated SDK. It takes time to figure out the equivalent function and
get it working. Thus, a bit of trial and error is needed with the fear that after
implementing relevant functions, it may not work.
• The Google documentation for getting this running is accurate and must be
followed.
• Forums (anddev.org) may be of help as users face similar problems, but it
needs a thorough search which may sometimes lead to a wrong suggestion.
Again, one’s patience may be tested here.

ROADBLOCKS:
• Since we extracted lots of data from Yahoo API, Yelp API etc., we found
that implementing everything in the phone would make it
tremendously slow. Hence we decided to use a Client Server
Architecture and performed all our operations on the server and with
MySQL as the server database. Though this helped us make the
application on the phone extremely light, it was hard getting the initial
server-database-android interaction to get working
• Yet another major issue we faced was in getting the client-server
communication. We started with a HTTP connection, to perform HTTP
Post but later found that many headers required for HTTP connection
are not available in the recent SDK. Hence we found an alternative for
it and performed URL connection. Due to very less availability of
tutorials or documentation regarding this, we had difficulty figuring out
its proper usage.

FUTURE PLANS:
• To notify customers about flight delays or any other hazards caused which
could cause a potential damage.
• To prepare a master itinerary that could be shared with the family
members who could discuss about the same
• To include more dynamic feature

DEPENDENCIES AND EXTERNAL RESOURCES

• API’s used
o Yelp
o Yahoo
o Google
• Other Resources
o Initial Itinerary from travel web sites