Travelindicator is an interactive data-driven travel guide that helps you find travel ideas and holiday destinations.
Target Audience: People aged 15-65 who enjoy traveling
Website URL: https://www.TravelIndicator.com
No. of Feedback Providers Requested: 3
Feedback sought:
1) Is the purpose of the website clear upon seeing the home page for the first time?
2) Are the destination pages informative and is there any information you think we should look at adding to them?
3) Is the searching and filtering of travel destinations straightforward and does it give you the type of results that you would expect?
The purpose of the website is very clear as it indicates that it is a travel website.
The destination pages are very informative and provides a great deal of information. The information that I would look forward to see is more visual stimulation in things such as large photos of the destination.
The searching and filtering of travel destinations are straightforward because if allows to search for an exact destination and provides the information that I was looking for in a travel website.
1) Is the purpose of the website clear upon seeing the home page for the first time?
Looking at the page, I was able to easily identify that the site was about traveling. What it does however, isn’t really clear to me.
My attention went to the search box and judging by the options, I guessed it will probably display travel destinations according to my preferences. At the right side, I read the text and that’s when I fully understood how the site works.
I find the right side of the banner a bit too cluttered and the text too small to read. Scrolling further down the page, I found myself skimming through a wall of more text. Maybe if the text were broken down into lists/bullets, it would be more interesting to go through them. The banner portion already gave me an idea of the site’s purpose anyway but it would be nice to be able to get to read the detailed info in a much quicker and easier way.
2) Are the destination pages informative and is there any information you think we should look at adding to them?
The pages were pretty informative. I like that there’s a list of Attractions included. I was hoping to see some comments/reviews from the users. Extra info about the culture would be nice too – like about festivals, religion and such.
3) Is the searching and filtering of travel destinations straightforward and does it give you the type of results that you would expect?
It is straightforward and the results were okay. I just found the item descriptions at the search results page a bit too cluttered. The tags were mixed with the description so that I thought they were part of the same sentence. I also found the weather/costs/fare a bit difficult to read, maybe because they were written in one line.
Thank you both for your responses. This is extremely useful for us and contains a number of practical points for us to address.
1) Is the purpose of the website clear upon seeing the home page for the first time?
I believe that when looking at the home page of Travelindicator.com, it is very clear with describing the purpose of the site. When you look at the page (without scrolling) you can see a box to the right of the page when it says: Join us and register at Travelindicator. Then you have the three questions: Why, Create and export custom travel guides, Track weather, prices and find similar destinations. With these reasons and their explanations, it gives clear evidence as to what this site is about. To me, I think this site is for the people who know what they want, but don’t know where to do it. I like this idea because with other travel sites, you have to put where you want to go and THEN it will give you what to do in the area. And that means that you will have to spend time to make sure that it has all the amenities that you want. With this site, you first list what you want, then it will give you destinations based on what you are looking for. I really appreciate how it is immediately explained as to what this site is for on other sites that I have visited, they give no clear information as to what the site is about. Great kudos for that!!
2) Are the destination pages informative and is there any information you think we should look at adding to them?
The destination pages are pretty informative. I do like how you break them down in the ‘Travel Themes’ section as to what the city has to offer. I also like the ‘Budget’ section as well, to give you an overview as to how much it will cost to visit, said destination. What I especially like is at the bottom of the brief overall of the city you have: [Review by travelindicator] [Similar places] [Nearby places], things that you can click for their respective objective. When considering this site and what it is suppose to be, if you have activities selected and you come across a city, here it is giving you an alternative city that is similar, giving you options as to where you can go based on your credentials. When it comes to any information that should be looked to adding is more cities that you are based out of. I know that Tampa, FL is not a major city in any means, but it is also not a small city as well. I would like to have seen a few more cities in the drop-down list. This way, when selecting a destination, the cost will be a little more accurate as to the cost of getting there. And I am a little lost as to what the Review by travelindicator is suppose to be for, for when I clicked it, I arrive to a page that has information about different locations. I thought that I would see a review about the particular destination that I was on.
3) Is the searching and filtering of travel destinations straightforward and does it give you the type of results that you would expect?
In regards to the searching and filtering of travel destinations, it does seem pretty straightforward. I don’t see anything complicated in selecting a destination, either by searching for it in the search box or by clicking the places tab. As the site mentions, right now it only has 784 destinations available to give a search query to. As it also mentioned, it is working on growing that number. So for the short time being online, this number is good for a start.
In conclusion about the site as a whole, I think the site has potential for helping people plan their vacations. This site is taking the search from a different prospective. It’s not putting a destination in and seeing what around to do, it’s putting in what one wants to do and seeing what destinations pop up. I think that is a great concept. In looking at the site and seeing how the information about these particular destinations are retrieved: “Our users vote on these themes per destination, thereby creating a theme mapping that in turn helps others discover new or similar places.” I don’t know how easy it will be to get a large number of people to “vote” to grow this theme mapping. Because of the large scale sites that offer travel information based on user input, it might be kind of hard to get users to leave some sort of feedback about the places that have traveled to here. I don’t know if it will be possible to get this kind of information from these other sites to help this community grow (get details about the destinations, the information that is needed to create this mapping).
I do like the out-side-of-the-box thought process of this site and the angle that it is coming from. If a person has an adventurous mind and just wants to try something new, there is not another site (that I can think of) that does something like this. Being able to give information about what you want to do and coming up with destinations, I think this site can succeed, however, getting people to leave feedback on yet another site might be kind of hard to do.