Apply HN: Wanderlust – Pandora for Travel

[kuisch]

Wanderlust is a website that helps you find out where you could travel to based on how much you can spend. A new way to plan and book your trips and an answer to the question of ‘where should I go?’.

The majority of traditional online travel websites (e.g. Booking, SkyScanner) work under the assumption that you know where you’re going. But what if you don’t know this? We don’t always have a destination in mind, but what we typically do have is a general sense of how much we can spend, what we like to see, and when we’d like to travel. Taking these variables into account, Wanderlust provides you with a complete trip - including destination, flight, accommodation, and an overview of the best things to do and see while you’re there.

To be sure, it’s still a little rough around the edges, but here's a quick demo: https://vid.me/TnZL

Our Product Hunt feature a while ago: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/wanderlust-pre-launch

Happy to answer any questions you may have!

(A bit about the team: Technical founder, BSc & MSc in Engineering physics; PHd in Artificial Intelligence. Business founder, Background in Communications; previously at Google, Vodafone.)

[buss]

This is something I've wanted many times in the past.

How will you guarantee variety of trips? Will people just end up seeing roughly the same things?

How are you making money?

What similar things have been tried, and why have they failed?

How will you maintain a place in people's minds? Most people only travel occasionally, why would they think of you? How would they find you?

[kuisch]

thank you for your comment

re: variety of trips -- we think the magic lies in providing our users with suggestions they may have never thought of themselves, but that end up being exactly what they've been looking for. We hope to do so by learning as much as possible about exactly those destinations out of the 'mainstream' (like Paris, London, Berlin) and subsequently translate that to the categories of interest we offer. We currently serve 220 destinations and think that achieving a certain level of variety will certainly be possible, especially as we learn more and more about our users and how they like our suggestions.

re: making money -- We don't plan to rush monetization. Volume is key in the travel industry, so we plan to focus on building a great, differentiated, user experience first. Once we've ramped that up significantly, we aim to move down the funnel (from the 'inspiration' phase towards the 'transaction phase'). Having said that, we're exploring multiple paths to monetization. For example, we think that Wanderlust will have an interesting advertising opportunity, with 1) high ARPU, 2) high purchase-intent, and 3) a user still open to suggestions (a bit like Pinterest's opportunity). One other stream we're thinking about is offering hotels an annual/monthly flat-fee to be featured on our platform.

re: similar attempts -- Wanderfly did this in the US (we're in Europe), but got acquired by TripAdvisor and shut down. There's quite a few different start-ups that launched either this year or in 2015. We feel they haven't quite gotten it right for several reasons, but it probably comes down to a not being able to translate technical complexity to a pleasant user experience.

re: user acquisition -- definitely a key point. As pointed out above, I think no-one has gotten the concept quite right so far. I think there's some mindshare to be won if we're the ones who manage to do so; if we're able to connect to the feeling of 'I know that I want to travel, but don't know where to go'. Initially, we'll be focusing on the channels the bigger players won't/can't focus on because of their scale (e.g. blogs, offline communities).

[christudor]

Yes. Great idea. I think you're totally right that travel websites make the mistake of assuming you know exactly where you want to go.