As a traveler or even as somebody from the travel industry, have you ever struggled to differentiate between two different travel app offerings? Perhaps you’ve found yourself comparing two travel apps, or two different travel software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers (expense reporting services, trip itinerary aggregators..), and felt like they were virtually indistinguishable from one another. This can be very frustrating for somebody within the travel industry so you can imagine how it would be for consumers, especially when they’re trying to make an informed decision about which service to choose within a narrow band of time and interest.
There is a particular challenge when it comes to differentiating travel startups and travel apps from a customer viewpoint. Unlike say the top 10 social media apps, whose customers are likely to be well-versed in the nuances of different software solutions (Instagram for pictures, TikTok for short view, YouTube for longer videos, SnapChat for filters & chatting), the average traveler will not be able to differentiate between two travel apps on their own because there are just so many of them bombarding them and at the end of the day they all blend into a mental mush of travel apps.
While travel apps do offer different features or approaches, these differences are not be immediately obvious to customers. This is surprisingly common and underappreciated by many travel startups and travel apps. “My app is special”; maybe to you it is but is it to travelers? How do you know that? Is your adoption rate and MRR reflective of this differentiation? It’s quite easy to see if it isn’t. All this doesn’t happen by accident. Travel apps will need to take a more tactical, surgical, and proactive approach to identifying their proprietary offerings, target customer profile and most importantly hammer the differentiation home time and again and again and again (assuming it’s important enough to be able to be differentiated which is no small thing to identify and a blog post on its own). Travel startups and travel apps are still surprisingly broad in a very crowded space. You can always grow your niche over time (going from say first time expectant mothers looking for luxury within 60 miles to expectant mothers (whether it’s their first time or not) and so on.
When customers are unable to differentiate between two travel apps, it becomes difficult for them to make a decision to purchase, to install or to be loyal to your travel startup. If two travel apps seem identical, for example, a customer might choose one at random, or simply choose the one with the most appealing design or the most downloaded one. This means your travel startup is losing out on the opportunity to communicate your unique value propositions to customers, and you’ll end up losing customers to competitors who are better able to communicate their differences and have better brand recognition (Expedia, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, AirBnb).
