Trip Planning is considered to be a tough space to survive and often the experts would advise you to stay out of the space because of the challenges. You often have to pay a lot to acquire new customers and with the space getting highly competitive, the climb keeps getting steep. Joshua and Neti understand the challenges very well and despite that, they decided to dive into this space With Excursion because almost all the available options lacked the flexibility a traveller needs.
Joshua and Neti at the Songkron Festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Joshua Rau is an avid traveller and a solar energy engineer turned entrepreneur. Neil Pengkhuan, his companion in the entrepreneurial journey is a travel lover and coder from Thailand. Dissatisfied with the other travel planning apps, they decided to bring out Excursion. Many of the apps miss out on offline usability and are more biased towards selling activities and hotels but Excursion addresses these problems. According to Joshua, the highlight of Excursion is its flexibility. The app doesn’t force the users to stick to any specific method of planning. Users can find things to do from the Foursquare database or even add custom items from Google Places. This feature allows travellers to even add their AirBnB rentals to their plans and get local recommendations from their hosts. This makes it a planning app with local discovery built it.
Another highlight of the app is its social element. We often learn about new places from other travellers and add them to our list of places to travel. They have recently updated the app and the latest one allows users to share their plans with strangers or people you meet while travelling. They can send each other travel ideas for their next destination.
While Excursion hasn’t been around for very long, the app has already helped travellers in making thousands of trip plans. With these interesting new features added in the latest update, they are expecting the numbers to grow exponentially. The sharing feature will make it more relevant to travel bloggers and local experts who will then be able to leverage this as another channel to communicate with other travellers.
The app is available for iOS devices and the founders have got a long list of exciting ideas that they will be adding over the coming months. There is also an Android app in pipeline which will be coming out very soon. You can download the iOS app here or find more details on their website. They are pretty welcoming to interesting ideas so you can shoot your suggestions to info@excursion-app.com.
