We build a new thing called Curiosio. It’s a search engine for the most curious road trips. We help leisure travelers to discover & experience places between different points of the journey. We see how it fits into the real world. For us, it’s just so obvious! For you, it may be not. If you are in search of visiting cities and places, together with having more fun, and adventure on the road, then we have what you need. I will describe you four real-life scenarios:
- “One-Click”
- “Do It Yourself”
- “Supertrip”
- “Social Soup”
One-Click
As a smart traveler, you are subscribed to Scott’s Cheap Flights. Scott is a real guy. In 2013, Scott Keyes found the best flight deal he’d ever seen: $130 roundtrip from New York City to Milan. He wasn’t planning on going to Milan, but simply couldn’t pass up such a good deal. In one sentence — airlines make mistakes, Scott finds them, sends to you, you book and save up to 90% on international flights (members save $550 per ticket on average).
But you may not be planning on going to Milan! You could subscribe to the multiple airports of your interest, and you will receive more flight deals. If you like a deal and want to buy, you contact Scott, Scott sends you additional information on how to find the deal on Google Flights or so to book it. As soon as you book the flights, you get bound to the five data points:
- number of travelers,
- start location,
- start date,
- finish location,
- finish date.
For example, you live in New York City, and booked flights to Australia, with arrival to Melbourne on the 10th of June, and departure from Sydney on the 22nd of June. Which defines your road trip in Australia — it starts in Melbourne on June 10th and finishes in Sydney on June 22nd. It’s your first time to Australia, and you want to make sure you are not missing a thing there. Here comes Curiosio. Open Curiosio in a web browser, select Australia, enter both locations and both dates according to your flights, number of tourists, hit GET TRIP button.
Notice that you could put the desired budget for the trip. Flights are not included in the budget, because you already got them from Scott. Everything else is included in the budget.
Curiosio returns trip plans with itinerary, route, day-by-day See & Do suggestions, breakdowns for time and cost. Here are three examples of the real trip plans found in those constraints, they are clickable:
When you find a trip plan, you could open Breakdowns view, to see what you will spend your time and money for and how. Cost breakdown will show car (rental, gas, tolls, parking), lodging, food & drinks, admissions, public transport. Time breakdown will show sightseeing & playing, moving within cities, driving between cities & locations. Below is a screenshot of the breakdowns for the first trip plan example:
Do It Yourself
If you know where you want to go between Melbourne and Sydney, you could enter more locations between Melbourne & Sydney in arbitrary order. Start is always the first location, finish is always the last location. For cyclic trips, the last location must be equal to the start location. Below is an example of the attempt to visit Grampians National Park, while sticking to all the same constraints.
It’s very tricky because the Grampians are located pretty far to the left from Melbourne, while Sydney is to the right. For less than two weeks with such curiosity-rich cities as Melbourne & Sydney, it’s quite tough schedule. Here are three examples of the real trip plans found in those constraints:
When you are satisfied with the trip itinerary, you could send the trip route to Google Maps. Then switch to the Car mode there and then send the directions to your phone or directly to your car, for turn-by-turn navigation. Enjoy the journey!
Supertrip
You could get inspired by a trip others did. You love it so much that you want to repeat it. But your number of days doesn’t match the duration of the original trip. You may need to make your trip on a different budget too. How to get the maximum overlap with the original trip within the new duration and new budget? How to supetrip the original trip? How to supertrip the trip you love to the trip you need?
For example, you found a 10 Day Sydney to Melbourne Drive at australia.com that you love so much, that is going to be your own next drive overseas. But there are a few issues that you have to fix:
- It’s Sydney-Melbourne, while your flights enforce Melbourne-Sydney.
- It’s 10 days, while your flights enforce 13 days.
The first step you do is to write down all the points from the original trip, using English Wikipedia spelling. The second step is to set Melbourne as first, Sydney as last, and leave everything in the middle as is. Below is a list of waypoints, in the plain text column format that Curiosio understands:
Melbourne
Kiama, New South Wales
Jervis Bay
Batemans Bay
Eden, New South Wales
Bairnsdale
Walhalla, Victoria
Foster, Victoria
Phillip Island
Cowes, Victoria
Mornington Peninsula
SydneyCopy this text column right into the Curiosio search field. Set number of tourists, dates, desired budget, and hit GET TRIP button. Below are three examples of the real trip plans found in those constraints:
Supertrip search allows you to augment waypoints, duration, and budget. At this stage, you could remove original points and add your own points. Below are travel itineraries for all original waypoints, but for the augmented duration from the original 10 to 13 days:
It’s also possible to enter desired locations one by one into the search field. I found it less error-prone if you write down the waypoints in a text editor, check them with English Wikipedia, change the names to Wikipedia if original names were different. It’s common case that names of locations are different between blogs, web sites. Curiosio works on canonical Wikipedia names. In the future, we will make the search requirements less strict. More details on how to hack the trips you love are given in our specialized post named Supertrips:
Social Soup
You ask friends for suggestions (on social networks). You ask foreigners for travel suggestions (on discussion boards). Friends and foreigners respond, with whatever they think would be the best for you. This is good. But the volume of those suggestions could be overwhelming. Suggestions could be conflicting. You could easily get 5 pages of comments, 3000 words of comments, many of them even not about what you asked for… We call it social soup.
Curiosio helps you here. You could put all recommended points into one long list, as you would do for supertripping one trip. Put even points from known mutually exclusive drives. For Curiosio it doesn’t matter how long the list of desired points is. Today, we set the limiter to 12 total points for a search query, but we could lift the limit if you want.
Melbourne
Adelaide
Jervis Bay
Eden, New South Wales
Bairnsdale
Mornington Peninsula
Gippsland Lakes
Croajingolong National Park
Eden, New South Wales
Grampians National Park
Griffith, New South Wales
Wagga Wagga
SydneyThe main difference between Social Soup and Supertrips is that in Supertrips you could expect a high degree of overlap with the original trip (high resemblance, high search relevance score), while in Social Soup you only expect that something will be boiled and distilled from what you put in. Curiosio will find you alternative drives in those conditions. One for the coastal drive without Wagga Wagga, one via Wagga Wagga but far from the coast.
Conclusion
These four scenarios were related to long haul flights, renting a car, and driving in the destination country. You could be super busy or lazy and get a most curious trip in one-click. You could be an educated traveler and specify your own waypoints. You could follow other travelers and supertrip their trip. And you could boil a soup from social recommendations, and distill your best trip from it. Follow your curiosity the smart way.
P.S.
There is one more real-life scenario: “My Car”.
We are thinking about multi-day road trips around cities where you live or stay, in their vicinity, without flying anywhere. E.g. you live in San Francisco and want to have a curious road trip to Arizona, having only several days. More user input will be needed, to know the area of interest, locations where the real trip starts and ends… You could DM your ideas to @CuriosioTravel and info@curiosio.com.
