Access data on travel destinations like never before to discover your hidden gems. π€ Answer some questions π Get personalised, quantitative recommendations for YOU π Explore destinations that meet your needs βοΈ A load balancer for travelers!
Hi PH! I'm Haichen, one of the creators of Cluey. @chrismessina - thanks for hunting us.
We're a bootstrapped startup from Sydney committing one of the cardinal sins of startups: building a travel product π€
We built Cluey because even though taking a vacation is a huge time and financial commitment travel research itself seems to be a combination of reading blogs and 5 year old (locked) forum posts on TripAdvisor. Googling to find yourself a list of destinations which are warm in December, safe for women, with hiking trails, fishing and distilleries? The yield on this is so low I think most of us are trained to not even bother.
We've been developing an algorithm which calculates compatibility scores against your individual preferences for over 4,500 destinations. Your preferences can be anything from:
* Weather
* Activities (94 to choose from but simplified for the chatbot)
* Popularity
* Cost (coming soon)
* Safety (general and female specific)
* Language
* Flight time
* LGBT attitudes
* Eco friendliness
The chatbot is our way of getting the algorithm out into the world in the quickest way we knew how. It's pretty linear and doesn't do any NLP (reliably anyway) but gets you to a personalised results page with 10 destinations (and any others you want to add for comparison sake). We couldn't find an efficient way in the chatbot to allow users to select from our full range of activities, the NLP was unpredictable.
What's next:
- We recognise that lots of people already know where they want to go, but want help discovering what to do at the destination. We're working on ways to surface this data.
- Fully functioning web app that allows better & faster control over inputs.
- Improving performance. The site is quite sluggish atm. Our Lighthouse Report score is damning.
Some lessons we've learnt:
- Finding free photos from Flickr is hard and can produce some strange results
- People love to try and break the chatbot
- Training your chatbot is pretty hard
- Design is harder than it looks
- There's some pretty cool places out there!
If you'd like to contact use directly: team@getcluey.com If you're interested in Cluey updates: https://mailchi.mp/ca5d6aa5a6c3/... (or share your email in the Chatbot)
PS If you are planning a holiday with specific requirements (esp around activities the chatbot doesnt support) comment below and i can run the model separately for you and send through your results :)
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Good job guys. Any plans to allow users to query directly in the future? e.g. without the need to do the entire questionnaire if I want to see everywhere thatβs warm in October.
@alexgilleran Yep that's one of the pieces of feedback we've gotten. Sometimes you really only care about 2 or 3 factors and just want to see what's available. We're working on that now - more of a catalogue/index you can filter than a guided process with results at the end.
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"We are planning to go to Spain in July for 8-9 days. Tell me, please, resorts, hotels (we consider only apartment-hotels) where it would be comfortable with a one-and-a-half-year-old child? We are planning to go for the first time so can you tell how to help the baby to come through the flight easier, what medications are necessary to have, what do you advise to take along with? And we want to rent a car, is it worth doing it at https://bookingautos.com/en or should we use help at the hotel?
p.s. maybe someone has a holiday experience with young children in Italy? Maybe it is better to go there?"
I agree with previous feedback. The chat experience seemed a bit long, though the results were interesting. I would try to allow the user to focus on what filters are actually important to him and limit the results only by them. Also, maybe it's just me, but the chatbot experience on messenger is a bit slow. I think this is something you can replicate on your site without too much techy hard-work and create great results. Lastly, love the idea - so many times I found myself trying to find vacation ideas by 3-4 factors (usually weather, distance from home, and price of travel tickets) and it takes a lot of work to accomplish that.
Good job! Would love to see how this product develops.
@kobyof thanks Jacob! Completely agree with you. The chatbot is a fast way of getting functionality shipped while we finish the design and dev of the full web experience (which will be much faster and less linear). If you're on the newsletter list you'll get the updates :)
Thanks for your support π
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I love it. There are some unique criteria in this chatbot that is very hard to search for. I guess I know where would I travel next.
Great start! Looking forward to see how you evolve this. I'm sure the more data you can feed in to understand the user the better it will get. It could be great for people like me who are taking short trips with a busy schedule (no time to research), so would love to see some filtering to help find those destinations. Keep it up!
Pros:
Interesting list of destinations, catering to the growing number of travellers wanting a niche holiday
Cons:
More options for the hours to travel would be good. Would take into account peoples budget.
Thanks for taking the time to review it David! Agree, more options for hours to travel and taking into account budget are important. We are working on building out the web version which will allow for more precise responses. We are also building another exciting feature on the website which will really help you find those destinations!
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Will watch itβs development. Maybe onto something...
Thanks! We actually started our journey with real estate (leads aren't valuable during a property bubble), phones (we found 3 or 4 phones objectively the best so the algo was useless unless you wanted very specific features like dual sim), and cars (too irregular of a purchase but we'd like to revisit this again the future).
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Great start! Looking forward to see how you evolve this. I'm sure the more data you can feed in to understand the user the better it will get. It could be great for people like me who are taking short trips with a busy schedule (no time to research), so would love to see some filtering to help find those destinations. Keep it up!
Pros:Interesting list of destinations, catering to the growing number of travellers wanting a niche holiday
Cons:More options for the hours to travel would be good. Would take into account peoples budget.
Cluey Travel
Will watch itβs development. Maybe onto something...
Pros:Fun to use
Cons:Can develop into other fields than travel
Cluey Travel