Rapid Dev Project Concept: City As Museum, “Tourist Trap”

Concept: City as museum

Name: Tourist Trap

**A better name would highlight the temporal & “local flavor” aspects of this tour app while also being super catchy.

Project Description

Tourist Trap prevents travellers from being trapped in chains.

This is a tool for busy travellers who do not want to get trapped wasting their limited spare time in chain stores and strip malls while visiting new locales. Tourist Trap aims to help travelers soak up the local flavor of their destination on their timeframe by offering curated tours that are categorized by the amount of spare time needed to enjoy them. Whether travellers have 2 hours, half a day, or a whole weekend free, Tourist Trap will help them find interesting and unique attractions.

Tourist Trap aims to support local economies by allowing small businesses to shine in a consumer economy rife with chain stores. There may be the opportunity for chambers of commerce or local business owners to feature “deals” or “specials” with Tourist Trap check-ins.

Features & Functionality

Guides and Tourists will be able to access Tourist Trap as a native mobile app on iOS and Android, but there will also be a web interface. While the mobile app will be highly functional, we believe that a web interface might encourage sustained and richer interaction.

• Mobile app: Tourists can access Tours from their mobile devices. They will be able to choose a Tour based on timeframe, follow directions to attractions, read enriching commentary, check-in, and provide feedback on individual attractions as well as the Tour as a whole. The aim is to leverage the feedback to rank Tours that are more worthwhile or valuable to visitors than other Tours. Tourists can also upload multimedia from specific attractions using the mobile app. Additionally, Guides can construct Tours on their mobile devices using this native app.
• Web interface: Tourists and Guides alike can access the web interface. As mentioned, we imagine that this would be useful to Guides for creating richly curated Tours. Guides will be asked to name a timeframe for their Tour, but they can also add “Captions” for each attraction as well as other metadata like cost, distance, travel need, key descriptive words, date (in the case of an event-based Tour), time-of-day, et cetera on the Tour and attraction levels. Tourists have the ability to upload multimedia and rate/provide feedback for Tours on the web. They may also browse Tours on the web and have them “sent” to their mobile device.

Upon visiting the website or installing the mobile app, both Tourists and Guides will register for accounts and fill in a profile which can help users contextualize the source of Tours and feedback alike. Profiles will be accessible through the mobile app and the web.

Getting the Word Out

A tool like Tourist Trap could appeal to business travelers and weekend adventurers alike. A potential user could be anybody who likes to get off the beaten path, but does not have the time to sift through pages and pages of Yelp reviews, Google searches, and locally based repositories of “things to do.”

We might reach them on the ground first, advertising at local businesses. To get locally based Guides on board, we might frame participation as an act of hometown pride and supporting the local economy. Likewise, we could appeal to Tourists who wish to support local economies rather than chain operations.

As mentioned, there may be the ability to partner with local chambers of commerce to provide “deals” for local businesses. We would also like to support integration with popular social utilities like Facebook and Twitter to stimulate adoption by word of mouth.