Booking trips and tours is all well and good when you know exactly where you want to go and what you prefer to see. But what if you need a little inspiration to choose? What if your itinerary is still not quite formed, and the attractions of a country are definitely too many for just one trip? Smart Trip Platform can help you solve the problem thanks to its amazing Discover section.
While our focus is definitely on offering the largest possible variety of travel services at the most competitive prices, we are also going to take care of trip planning and inspiration. To do that, we will introduce a decentralized travel guide module created by users – we have named it Discover. You probably know about Wikitravel and Wikivoyage already, and many of you probably use Tripadvisor to get opinions on what is worth seeing and what is not. We will have similar functionality on our platform, the main difference being that users will be rewarded for their creative activity and input.
What do Wikitravel users get in exchange for creating and editing pages about cities and attractions? Nothing! That is why tons of pages on this site are simple stumps, with the most basic information about a place. You have to be a particular kind of person to spend your time expanding or updating information on a Wikitravel page knowing that you will not be paid and nobody will know your name. We find it inefficient and unfair.
Here is a case scenario to make our idea clear. Imagine you’ve just been to Sri Lanka, visiting national parks with their amazing wildlife and ruins – all by public transport. Your memories of prices and transportation are still fresh, so you decide to earn a good bonus and increase your rating by sharing your experience. You visit and edit pages in the Discover section, such as Yala NP and Sinharaja rainforest, filling in some details on current costs, whom to contact, and how often buses go. Your effort is rewarded with activity points, that increase your rating. Of course, we will have a system in place to prevent abuse – such as people adding nonsensical text in order to get rating points: all texts will need to pass moderation, which will also be decentralized.
If, on the other hand, you use Discover pages to plan your trip, and you find a particular page very helpful, you can put your Like on it, and every author who worked on a page will automatically get a rating point. This way, the authors’ efforts will keep bearing fruit as long as other users read pages created by them!
Each Discover page will include background information on history and culture, details on how to get to a place, moving around, where to eat and sleep, common scams and annoyances, entry fees and opening times… The page will also be linked to user reviews of the attraction, giving you the best tools for evaluating it. Each attraction will be supplied with a range of tags, so that if your interest is birdwatching, for example, you will be able to run a search in the Sri Lanka section looking just for places of interest to birdwatchers.
Of course, even with a wealth of detailed information pages building a complete itinerary can be hard – that is why we will give our users a fantastic possibility to share their itineraries with others! If instead (or in addition to) editing pages about places you visited in Sri Lanka you will also write down your whole itinerary – including transportation details and all the practicalities – and make it available to other users on the platform, you will get not only rating points, but also loyalty points each time your itinerary is used. This way, you can increase your status and unlock additional discounts faster!
If you have any suggestions on further improving our Discovery section, share them with us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/STplatform/ and Telegram t.me/st_platform! And of course, remember that the Smart Trip Platform token presale is in progress – join now at smarttripplatform.io and get a fantastic 20% discount.