I’m a sucker for apps that, on the surface at least, appear incredibly simple and reduce cognitive load considerably. LuckyTrip is one of those apps. Available for iOS, it lets you find a trip in just one tap.
Perhaps taking its inspiration from Google’s original ‘feeling lucky’ search engine, after setting your budget via the onscreen slider, you tap the ‘Lucky’ button and LuckyTrip presents you with a potential trip, broken down into “Travel,” “Accommodation” and “Something to do.” Don’t like any of the suggestions? Then simply tap the ‘Lucky’ button again. And again.
“For too long now the process of finding and booking a trip has been time consuming and complicated. The traditional travel sites are cluttered, with hundreds of choices that easily overwhelm you. The average user visits seven different platforms, spending over 6 hours researching a single trip,” says LuckyTrip co-founder Tiff Burns when asked to describe the problem the app solves.
“We use the cheapest flights from Skyscanner, the best places to stay from Booking.com and unique handpicked things to do chosen by us. If you don’t like a trip, keep on tapping ‘Lucky’ to generate trips to new locations. Save trips, share them with friends and book, all on your phone,” he adds.
The result is a nicely designed and single use-case app that aims to encourage people to be “spontaneous, explore and go on new adventures,” perfect for those who like to take the odd long weekend city (or otherwise) break.
“Quite often people just go with what they already know, choosing the same tourist spots as everyone else. We think this is because of the way traditional travel companies work. They all like to ask us ‘where do you want to go?’. But what if you don’t know where to go? We think for a lot of people a much more relevant question is ‘how much do you want to spend?’ LuckyTrip searches by budget, not by location. Tell us how much you want to spend and LuckyTrip does all the hard work for you.”
Noteworthy is that Burns and his brother and co-founder Alex Burns initially tested the premise behind LuckyTrip without building a functional MVP. Instead the pair put up a one page website with the concept of the app and invited people to register their interest. However, to be added to the invite list they were required to answer a questionnaire about their travel habits.
“A few weeks later we had a huge surge of traffic, and loads of really interesting answers to our questionnaire. We used this as proof of concept, and it really helped our decisions early on,” says Burns.
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