MAL-finalDocument

8/7/2019 MAL-finalDocument

1/15

SMARTRAVELLER - HOLIDAY PLANNERSYSTEM

Plan your holiday as you go

Ashish Iyer [email protected]

Aparna Raman [email protected] Parthasarathy [email protected] Ramakrishnan [email protected]

PROJECT IDEA:

Welcome to the future of holiday planning! SmarTraveller brings to thecommunity a fresh breath of air in the self holiday planning market. Bycombining knowledge bases from the past, going the extra mile,collaborating with existing periphery business organizations and usingholiday-planning software, SmarTraveller plans to lead the market inproviding quality services time after time. The holiday planning software

brings interactive holiday planning as close as your Android mobile phone.Through the services offered, SmarTraveller aims to be the number oneservice for any kind of holiday.

The itinerary is only a first step toward a great travel experience.SmarTraveller uses your itinerary to build a personalized, contextuallyrelevant, continually updated set of directions, reference information, andoptions to make the trip as enjoyable as possible.

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE:


2/15


3/15

SmarTraveller is a small business that is aiming big. The three mainobjectives are listed as follows:

1. Be the best dynamically adjusting holiday planning tool on a mobileinterface

2. Ensure profitability of the company as well as the local tourismvendors/companies.

3. Expand the business scope to encompass more location and vendors.

1.2 Mission

In such a fast changing world, where people do not have time to Stop andStare, holidaying becomes an important aspect of life, especially when itacts as a stress buster. Recreation is essential. SmarTravellerstrives to bethe best choice for clients by helping to ease their holiday planning burden,ensuring a worry-free and hassle-free vacation at a reasonable price.

Being in sync with the current market needs, combining technology andtrends and providing customers reliable service is the daily mission of theSmarTraveller group.

1.3 Keys to Success

Our keys to success include the commitment to quality by every person inthe team. The group hopes to bring professionalism and to improve in thefollowing areas:

1. Competitive prices for the services offered

2. Assured amount of profit made on every holiday planned.3. Market research and competition.

4. Maintaining good relation with basic reservation service offeringvendors like kayak.com, makemytrip.com etc for collaborationpurposes.

2. SERVICES

SmarTravelleraims to provide services to a wide variety of people who differin age, tastes and hobbies. This makes it a viable service for anyone whowishes to go on a vacation.

We aim to provide the following services:

1. Pocket Tourist GuideThis service will guide a user based on his location and suggest touristplaces and other places of attractions. The user is free to select theones he likes and discard the others. The software will then plan andallot slots to all the user selected items. It will take care of the planning
http://kayak.com/http://makemytrip.com/http://kayak.com/http://makemytrip.com/


4/15

while accepting parameters which include flight reservations, personalwork and other commitments the user might have.

2. DynamicPlanning.

Adjusting an itinerary on the go is always a hassle andpeople tend to avoid it. But in this service we plan to offer consumers

an easy way to do the same. The user would just need to enter theevent and specify details like time and importance of the event andbased on this data the software would change the itinerary and givethe user the modified plan which would take care that the user doesnot miss the earlier reservations like a flight etc. The application mayneed to delete another event to do so, but it would notify the user andthen proceed before doing any deletions. It also provides suggestionsbased on weather and users preferences, which helps the useraccommodate uncontrollable changes in plans.

3.0 Market Segmentation

The breakdown of the market for holiday planning falls in a wide, very diversegrouping. Individuals as well as organizations demand the services weprovide. The market segments have been broken down into Individuals, theirfamily and friends and age groups.

1. Individuals, their family and friends, travel agents and traveldepartments

Our largest clients will be normal everyday life human beings who wishfor a break and need to plan everything from scratch. The sheervolume of such people is what makes this section of people to be

driving our profits. These people also will have set vacation times in ayear allowing us to focus more in their behavioral predictions andtailoring the services we provide to them.

2. Age Groups

Under 24: Persons under the age of twenty-four (24) using a holidayplanner will be least in number. We hope to tap the early collegegraduates who have begun their professional careers but have not yetstarted their families. The revenues generated will range frommoderate to high, depending on the destination and volume ofstudents using it.

Ages 25-55: The persons that fall into this age group are employed,middle to upper-middle class families. The reason they choose holidayplanners is they are too busy to do it themselves. Therefore,SmarTravellerwill be on hand for questions, contact will be moderatein length but occur regularly so as not to disturb the daily life of thefamilies. These will generate moderate revenues, with a fewgenerating low and high revenues.


5/15

Ages 56 and above: Persons over the age of 55 have reached theturning point of life. These events will generate moderate to highrevenues depending upon the income level of the family. Their age willgive them the freedom to stay on vacation longer they will have noneor least commitment towards work and other income earning duties.Though they might have the time to plan an entire vacation most of

them would not do so as it would be too much of a hassle. They wouldprefer following an automated guide and enjoying the vacation. Thiswill be our critical market section.

3.1 Target Market

Our target markets are middle to upper middle class families, individuals,couples or small organizations. We choose them as they are the ones whichwould have the resources financially but little time to plan all the events.Families need recreation and employed individuals may be overburdenedwith work. Thus they generally ignore this aspect of life.

Thus SmarTraveller allows them to spend enjoyable time with friends andfamily without getting their hands dirty in all the planning involved.

Cost Model:

The cost model involves cost relating to setting up the business unit ,running costs and also the profits and the fee charged by us forproviding the services. According to certain figures , the statisticswould be as follows :

EXPENSES INCURRED :

Cost of initial deployment for setting up services: $25,000

Cost for collaboration and association with Trip Planner sites: $50,000

Marketing ( TV, Radio, online advertisements) : $50000(Advertising fees: 4.5%)

Development and Software Support : $40000 per person annually with a rough estimate of 4 - 8people

Legal fees: $5,000

Advertising fees: 4.5%

PROFITS INCURRED :

Kayak.com - 8% of the profit Kayak makes per trip (i.e)per itinerary

Local Restaurants - 5% of the profit


6/15

Locale Specific Shopping - 10% of the profit

Tourist Attraction Deals (Ticket Deals) - 10% of the profit

REVENUE GENERATION:

Source of Revenue Type Examples1)

Users Sale Travel Lovers Business Executives School Tours Last minute Trip

Planners

2)

Travel Planning sites kayak.com,makemytrip.com,tripit.com,

weather.com

Sale Dynamic extensionof travel itinerary

3)

Advertisement Hotels,Restaurants and promotionof Tourist Attraction Sites

Sale Locale SpecificShopping

Hotels andRestaurants

Travel Dealspertaining tospecific attractions

4)

Hotels and Restaurants Subscription Up to daterestaurant database

Up to dateconsumer database5)

Advertisements Sale Restaurants Travel Planning

websites Locale Specific

shopping Promotion of Tourist

Attraction Places Ticket Deals Car Rentals


7/15

6 Travel Agents Sale Travel agents to compileitineraries for clients, andby travel departments

within businesses.

4.0 Competition

Our proposed idea is relatively new and contains no one in a directcompetition. However we would be competing to bring in this new idea ascompared to the traditional ideology. People now-a-days depend onsuggestion from friends, on the local tourism companies and help from othermiscellaneous sources while planning a trip. Rarely does anyone plan a tripentirely in an independent manner. We find our main competitors would be:

a. Other web-based trip planning companies.b. Local tourism companies which offer combo dealsc. People wishing to plan their own trip

4.1 Beating the Competition

Our application is mainly a live real time guide to a trip which is not offeredby web based trip planning companies.

Although local tourism companies do offer a real time guide, but theirschedules are rigid and also their trip is not tailored for an individual or afamily. It is meant for the majority and all may not have the same taste. Ourapplication is based on every individual or family making it personalized.

For people who wish to plan their own trip this would not be useful. Butwe are right in assuming that the volume of such people will be verysmall which would not impact our business.

MOCKUPS:

The basic functionalities of the system:

1) After the welcome screen, the user sees the itinerary he hadplanned with holiday planner websites like kayak, makemytripetc.


8/15

During the travel, when the user clicks on Day 1 of the itinerary,it navigates to the plan for the first day. When MAP is clicked, it


9/15

shows the location of the current coordinates.

When the user clicks on the next feature Tourist Attraction, apartfrom the normal itinerary being shown, the system will suggestother places ( For eg. A zoo in Los Angeles might be near somelocation visited in the current itinerary).


10/15

TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE CLIENT SERVER ARCHITECTURE


11/15

SCREENSHOTS:

Welcome Screen:

Checking weather for an address:


12/15

Itinerary display by Days:


13/15

Suggestions List based on Current Itinerary:

LEARNING :


14/15

Considering the fact that Android has an updated SDK 0.9, it takes a whileto get acclimatized to it and begin using it. There is limited help available onthe website and not enough literature, reference or tutorial available thatassists you in covering every facet of developing android applications.Though basic tutorials do exist, they are few in number and contain very littlehelp for detailed design.

All codes point to the older versions of the SDK and a lot has changed eversince the updated SDK. It takes time to figure out the equivalent function andget it working. Thus, a bit of trial and error is needed with the fear that afterimplementing relevant functions, it may not work. The Google documentation for getting this running is accurate and must befollowed. Forums (anddev.org) may be of help as users face similar problems, but itneeds a thorough search which may sometimes lead to a wrong suggestion.Again, ones patience may be tested here.

ROADBLOCKS:

Since we extracted lots of data from Yahoo API, Yelp API etc., we foundthat implementing everything in the phone would make ittremendously slow. Hence we decided to use a Client ServerArchitecture and performed all our operations on the server and withMySQL as the server database. Though this helped us make theapplication on the phone extremely light, it was hard getting the initialserver-database-android interaction to get working

Yet another major issue we faced was in getting the client-servercommunication. We started with a HTTP connection, to perform HTTPPost but later found that many headers required for HTTP connectionare not available in the recent SDK. Hence we found an alternative forit and performed URL connection. Due to very less availability of

tutorials or documentation regarding this, we had difficulty figuring outits proper usage.

FUTURE PLANS:

To notify customers about flight delays or any other hazards caused whichcould cause a potential damage.

To prepare a master itinerary that could be shared with the familymembers who could discuss about the same

To include more dynamic feature

DEPENDENCIES AND EXTERNAL RESOURCES

APIs usedo Yelp

o Yahoo

o Google

Other Resourceso Initial Itinerary from travel web sites


15/15

MAL-finalDocument

Documents

Transcript of MAL-finalDocument