by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusyak
On Sunday, April 14, 2019, Roman and Vasyl ran a curious hackathon, codenamed “Supertrips”. The hackathon was resourceful. This post is based on results and is driven by unlocked ideas.
The idea is to take any great trip from anywhere (travel site, blog, guidebook) and bend it to your unique desires, preserving the original trip spec as much as possible.
We will show you how to bend trips by time only, by budget only, by waypoints only and by everything altogether at once. It is trip shaper. You will learn how to make exclusive supertrips with our trip shaper. “Super” word comes from the way you are making it — on top of another trip.
Trip Markup
First thing to do is to find a trip that inspires you. Then scribe it in trip markup form. The Trip Markup Language example is shown in the grey rectangle below. You could copy-paste this whole text directly into the search field at beta3.ingeenee.com and hit the red button. Curiosio will understand it and gets initialized by that trip.
# trip in Canada that you love
# keep a link to original trip here
geography=Canada
duration=15
budget=3500
tourists=2# desired waypoints
Vancouver
Victoria, British Columbia
Whistler, British Columbia
Wells Gray Provincial Park
Jasper National Park
Banff National Park
Calgary
Below is a trip search result for this markup example. Once you created a trip similar to the trip that inspired you, you could start customizing it.
Bend Duration
Here are use cases when a traveler wants to keep the same itinerary, same budget but wants to adapt them to the different duration of the trip:
- I love this trip, could I keep everything as is and compress it by 1 day?
- I love this trip, could I keep everything as is and stretch it by 1 day?
- I love this trip, could I keep everything as is and compress it by 2 days?
- I love this trip, could I keep everything as is and stretch it by 2 days?
Search result for a trip shorter by 2 days.
Search result for a trip longer by 2 days. The budget range is $3300–4000, the upper number is shown in the trip embedding.
Bend Budget
Here are use cases when a traveler wants to keep the same itinerary, same duration but wants to adapt them to the different budget of the trip.
- I love this trip, could I keep everything as is and save $500?
- I love this trip, I could spend $500 more, what’s curious is unlocked in the vicinity of the original route?
Search result for a trip with a lower budget, the lower edge is $3000.
Search result for a trip with a bigger budget, $4000. This trip unlocked more waypoints for that budget, though the intensity of the trip also increased.
Bend Waypoints
You may want to change the cities and locations in the itinerary while preserving the original duration and budget.
- I love this trip, but I want to add Kelowna and Lake Louise to the itinerary.
- I love this trip, but I would like to remove generic Canadian Rockies location from the itinerary.
- I love this trip, but I would like to add Lake Louise and remove generic Canadian Rockies location.
This is a trip markup with Kelowna and Lake Louise (Alberta) added. Reminder that the names must be as in English Wikipedia. Notice Kelowna and Lake Louise (Alberta) inserted below Calgary. So that Calgary remains the finish of the trip.
geography=Canada
duration=15
budget=3500
tourists=2Vancouver
Victoria, British Columbia
Whistler, British Columbia
Wells Gray Provincial Park
Jasper National Park
Banff National Park
Kelowna
Lake Louise (Alberta)
Calgary
Search result for a trip with Kelowna and Lake Louise added.
This is a trip markup on the same trip with exclusion of Canadian Rockies. Notice a minus sign “-” in front of Canadian Rockies.
geography=Canada
duration=15
budget=3500
tourists=2
Vancouver
Victoria, British Columbia
Whistler, British Columbia
Wells Gray Provincial Park
Jasper National Park
Banff National Park
Kelowna
Lake Louise (Alberta)
-Canadian Rockies
CalgarySearch result for a trip, without Jasper National Park, but with Lake Louise, Kelowna and automatically proposed Yoho National Park, possible in 15 days at $3500 for two.
Jaw Dropping
Next batch of use cases is about shaping the original trip, by augmenting duration, budget, and waypoints altogether at once. Augmentation is possible in same or opposite directions (add/remove, increase/decrease).
- I love this trip, could I keep the original waypoints on the route, but compress it all by 1 day, and save $500?
- I love this trip, I could spend extra $600, and 3 more days, what’s curious is unlocked in the vicinity of the original route?
- I love this trip, I need to save $500, and want to stretch it by 2 days, need to add Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, Lake Louise to the itinerary.
This is a trip markup for the options described in the last bullet. Notice added Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and Lake Louise right after Vancouver. The order doesn’t matter, you could add it right before Calgary as well. Only first and last positions matter. You could copy-paste this markup text directly into the main search field at beta3.ingeenee.com
geography=Canada
duration=17
budget=3000
tourists=2
Vancouver
Pacific Rim National Park Reserve
Lake Louise (Alberta)
Victoria, British Columbia
Whistler, British Columbia
Wells Gray Provincial Park
Jasper National Park
Banff National Park
CalgaryAnd here is a trip found for those all-changed requirements, in comparison to the based trip, introduced far on top of this post. You got it in 17 days at $3200 with good comfort. Pacific Rim and Lake Louise present. Original itinerary locations also present. The whole route is arranged.
Auction
We will handle bookings for you. As soon as you found/made your next trip plan, you could instantly book it with us. Actual booking rates will be taken from your selection to book. We will show you pre-filtered rooms by price, comfort, style, location. Staying within the proposed range will keep you within predicted costs, but you could decide to select and book cheaper or pricier than the proposed collection.
If you don’t need an instant booking, e.g. want to catch some good discount or promo, then you could subscribe to price drop alerts for your trip plan. We will notify you when the same comfort is possible for the same dates and same locations. Or will notify you when better comfort pops up for the same rate.
We are thinking of the use cases when you could specify your booking preferences, especially for price and comfort. “Name your price” worked for Priceline. “Name your trip” could work for us. If we find a deal, then we give you the deal. If we find a similar deal, you could still take it. Locals and travel professionals could work on the bids by travelers. This case is an auction.
We are building a trip marketplace, with travel AI is in the middle, doing NP-complete search for travelers and professionals, where you could imagine the next curious trip in three ways:
- Do it all yourself, as self-service, find it quickly, book it all quickly.
- Optimize trip skeleton and stay alert for the potential booking deals. Book incrementally. Book start and finish quickly, book the middle as you go.
- Make a bid, so that travel professionals handle your unique bid during several days (even weeks), with unique hacks & expertise, to make a deal for you.
Trip Markup Language
The trip markup format is very simple, it’s plain text. One part could be named a header: geography, duration, budget, number of tourists. Budget is always in USD [so far]. Duration is always in days.
Another part is a sequence of locations you want to visit. The first location is the start, the last location is the end of the trip. If first and last names are identical, then it will be a cyclic trip. Curiosio is perfect when you got the flights. The start location is where you land, the finish location is where you take off.
If you want some location to be omitted explicitly, then put a minus sign right before it, like in Google advanced search. The names must be like in English Wikipedia. Below is an example of excluding Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and Whistler, British Columbia from the itinerary.
-Pacific Rim National Park Reserve
-Whistler, British ColumbiaYou could use multiple lines of comments. It is rational to keep [in comments] the links to original trips that inspired you. You could use any order of lines in header, that suits you best: e.g. write budget first and geography last, or a number of tourists first and duration last. You could insert multiple empty lines, according to your aesthetic and usability needs.
Maybe in the future, we will implement automatic recognition of trips from multiple formats [that you could paste directly into Curiosio]. Before that, this manual markup work has to be done.
As it’s a plain text — any text editor works. Spreadsheets work too, as you could copy-paste as text from them. You could co-design trips with your friends or family in Google Docs or Dropbox or Office 365. Then copy-paste into Curiosio for bending to your requirements.
More Trip Markup Examples
Australian trip in markup format.
# Australia 16d at $3700 for 2
duration=16
budget=3700
geography=Australia
tourists=2# desired waypoints
# names must be as in English Wikipedia
Sydney
Tamworth, New South Wales
Yamba, New South Wales
Byron Bay, New South Wales
Brisbane
Noosa National Park
Fraser Island
Whitsunday Islands
Airlie Beach, Queensland
Cairns
Indian trip in markup format.
# India 10 days from 2400 USD
# you could put a link to original trip here
geography=India
duration=10
budget=2500
tourists=2# desired waypoints
# names must be as in English Wikipedia
Delhi
Agra
Ranthambore National Park
Jaipur
Nawalgarh, Rajasthan
Shekhawati
Delhi
