Social Travel
It’s been a while, so let’s get back on the Service Design train…
While on vacation this past winter, I read a Wall Street Journal article (It Happened One Flight) about social travel sites.
These are sites which enable you to meet other people and coordinate travel. This could be for something as simple as sharing a taxi ride to the airport, or something more serious like sitting next to a person from a particular industry so you can network during the flight, or perhaps find a date.
(The following descriptions are taken from the respective sites.)
www.airtroductions.com – “Make your next flight more interesting, and choose the person who sits next to you! Build a profile, enter your itinerary, match, and sit with them on your next flight!”
www.hitchsters.com – “Connects travelers so they can share taxis (and thus split the fare) to and from an airport.”
www.soulescape.com – A U.K. based company, “SoulEscape™ can connect you with travel companions whose interests, personality and itineraries mesh with your own.” Take “travel companion” as you will.
www.tripmates.com – “Whether you are interested in meeting locals or fellow travelers during a trip or finding a “trip buddy” so you don’t have to travel alone, Tripmates gets you connected before you depart.” Not specifically a dating site, but it could be.
www.2insteadof1.com – “2insteadof1 is your new travel gateway for anyone who would rather travel with someone than alone. You have the great opportunity to meet and find your ideal travel partner for a nice vacation or maybe …for the rest of your life…”
Personally, I find hitchsters.com the most interesting, specifically because it enables the increased efficiency of resource usage through coordination. However, it requires a critical mass of subscribers to be useful. I was thinking that maybe websites aren’t the best channel for this kind of service, since you have to be at a computer to use it. But if you could SMS that you’re looking for a cab to the airport and it would hook you up with another person in the immediate vicinity in real-time…that would be useful.
It reminds me of what happened in NYC during the transit strike in 2006, where cabbies were driving around asking people on the street where they were going so they could maximize their passenger load. I feel like this kind of text-message-enabled taxi service is such a standard interaction design cliche though…
I think that there’s something about in-flight social networking, but I’m not convinced just yet. I think it has to do with needing critical mass, because otherwise your odds of meeting someone are a little too low. It might be interesting if applied on an airline by airline basis. So Jetblue starts offering fliers the opportunity to put a little online profile alongside their seat selection. Things could get weird or creepy though, really quickly…elderly men choosing to sit next to young girls traveling alone, or people putting in false information (“I snore…very loudly!”) so that nobody will sit next to them.
However, it does make me wonder why seat selection criteria is so limited. For instance, I would be very happy if I could choose to sit far away from little babies on long flights. On the other hand, by virtue of random seat selection sometimes you get to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise. Just some thoughts….