by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
Hey curious travelers, today we are releasing Curiosio Beta15 for you! It is called Destination Trips. The code name was “Flower” Trips because their daily routes are looking like the petals of the flower. You are staying at the same point each day, exploring that point, and taking short detours in its environs.
We designed this “flower” trips topology because travelers with families reported multiple check-ins and check-outs as quite a hustle. So now you can stay/sleep at the same location and Curiosio will squeeze the interesting See & Do from the destination and its environs. You can plan road trips by multiple requirements simultaneously: travelers, destination, duration, budget, perimeter… color, smell, sound:)
It’s OK to jump to https://curiosio.com to check it out right away, though we are encouraging you to continue reading how we thought, designed, tested the new version of Curiosio.
“Flowers”
Beautiful things work better. We believe that beautiful aircraft fly better, beautiful car rides better. Beautiful routes & itineraries give you better emotions, better emotions build stronger memories. Aren’t these beautiful routes resembling the flowers?
We started designing the “Flower” trip planner a few months ago. It took a while because of tons of underlying invisible tasks such as data resolution at zoom-in, smart perimeter by default, realism i.e. realistic daily plans, etc.
With this official release, we are renaming the “Flower” trips to Destination trips. You will see a tab with the “Destination trip” label in UI. While in our hearts these journeys are flowers forever.
User Experience
UX remains a thin layer over the advanced AI engine Ingeenee working behind the scenes, crunching the NP-Complete math. For you Curiosio is a web app, working in Chrome, Chromium browsers. Maybe it is working in Safari but we did not test it. It is working in mobile DuckDuckGo with minor visual layout/alignment issues. We suggest you use Chrome or Chromium, the latest two versions.
Navigate to Curiosio landing page, select a county of interest, you will see a web page similar to the one below; click the “Destination” tab on small screens or “Destination trip” on big screens, and you are all set to try how it works.
The Destination point is a city or town or park where you are going to sleep at night. If the destination is rich with See & Do then Curiosio will recommend what to experience.
If you are staying aside from the main area of interest (e.g. because it’s cheaper) then you can define your custom Perimeter, and Curiosio will recommend you See & Do within the perimeter, which returns to the location of stay.
Travel-thru points for Destination Trips are not implemented yet. The reason is that we are still analyzing this. At the close distances when the Earth starts rotating around you — individual places and attractions are becoming as important as a small town or cool village. Maybe we will implement this at once as travel-through POIs and travel-through points, and travel-through regions. Meanwhile, you could tell us what you would prefer and why.
Let’s dig deeper how the Destination Trip Plan looks like and how it works.
Use Case 1
For the first use case, we are going to Boston, MA as the destination. Assuming that 2 travelers going to Boston for 5 days and want a quirky Obscure trip. Obscure means that Curiosio will propose places from Atlas Obscura if they are available in the area and other similar See & Do. Here is an example trip plan in those requirements:
This trip plan is quite obscure, just look at the See & Do in Salem on Day 1. Those places are definitely from Atlas Obscura. Here is the interactive trip plan for you to play with:
Notice that each day has a corresponding button [Daily Plan]. Click on that button opens a new page with the daily programme. All points are ordered, and See & Do at the points are ordered. You could view attractions as pins on the map. You could unite them in a round route. Until we don’t know where exactly you are staying we don’t know how exactly you are entering and exiting the city.
Use Case 2
For the second use case, we are going on the island Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. Let’s set Dorgali as the destination, we will stay/sleep there. And we will set the custom perimeter — e.g. we want to include the top of Sardinia in our journey. This time we prefer the Curious theme [to avoid scary temples or witchcraft]. Here is an example trip plan in those requirements:
In this example, we show you that everything is clickable. You can click the pins on the map, you can click the names of the points and places. They will be opened either on English Wikipedia or Atlas Obscura. For Ukraine, the places are often opened on OpenStreetMap. This depends on our data for each country. Here is the interactive trip plan for you to play with:
Notice there is no [Supertrip] button for the destination trip plans. We have not conceptualized how this should work. We consider that the Supertripping of the “flowers” must be integrated with travel-through places, and the opportunity to shuffle the daily plans. What if the weather changed? You could swap day 1 with day 4 or so. You could tell us what you prefer and why.
Issues
There are some know issues with this release.
At the high data resolution, we discovered that many places in London in the United Kingdom were not classified as belonging to London. As result, they are proposed as stand-alone towns or villages. We have to re-configure the Knowledge Graph for GB and this will be fixed. The OSM data is still to be added to all countries (except Ukraine), so during that effort re-configuration will take place, and the issue with false-positive entities will be fixed.
Another nasty issue is visual. It’s a route preview in the carousel of search results. Trip plans’ routes are made from straight lines like the Pythagorean triangle. We know how to fix it, it’s a Mapbox API-related issue. This is not prioritized high, but you could speed it up if you can’t look calmly at those straight lines.
Next Steps
- Facelift. Maybe two facelifts.
- Fine-tuning UI. The concept is ready, the implementation is pending.
- Higher data resolution via OSM data source.
- Introduce [Daily Plan] for Round Trip and One-Way Trip?
- Introduce Destination Signature Trips?
Thank you for reading/scanning/skimming. Now it’s definitely the right time to navigate to https://curiosio.com and check the Destination Trips. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity!
