Pre-launch Checklist for Successful Travel Apps

Whenever a person plans a trip to their dream destination, they exceed their limitations to explore the internet in search of new and unfamiliar places.

This has prompted several travel and hospitality businesses, like Airbnb, MakeMyTrip, Expedia, and American Express, to invest in travel app development.

About 70% of spontaneous bookings and trips are made using smartphones.

Moreover, Uber recorded 107 million downloads, and Airbnb had 52 million app downloads in the list of most downloaded travel apps globally.

This study depicts how travel apps can be a valuable investment for entrepreneurs and start-ups seeking to dive into the travel and tourism industry.

To help you develop a successful travel app, we’ve curated a list of pointers to do a last-minute check-up before the app launch.

Checklist for Successful Travel Apps

1. Define Your App’s Purpose:

The first and foremost thing to consider while developing a successful app is defining your app’s goal and purpose. It’s your decision whether you want to create a booking app, a trip planner app, or a travel guide app. Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the need for your app?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What your travel app will offer?
4. How your app idea is different from other travel apps?
5. What is the problem your app will solve?

After getting answers to these questions, you will get an understanding of what your travel app aims to serve.

2. User Persona and Journey Mapping:

User Personas will help you understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and expectations. With this, you can find out what your users want and what their emotional drivers are, and then you can target those as features in your travel app.

To create the user persona, build a list of questions to ask your target users.

1. How often do you like to travel?
2. What motivates you to plan a trip?
3. What do you expect from a travel app?
4. Did it match your expectations?

5. What activities do you prefer to do during the trips?

After asking this set of questions to multiple target users, you can gather a thorough understanding of users’ preferences, likes, and expectations. Based on the data obtained from the survey, draft a user persona like the one mentioned below:

The next thing is to create a user journey map. It’ll provide insights into what users go through in the app, their motivation, emotions, and decision-making process at each stage. Mapping the user journey will help you to identify areas of improvement, opportunities to engage users effectively, and address challenges, improving the overall user experience.

By focusing on user personas and journey mapping, you can build a strong foundation for the development of your travel app, ensuring it meets the diverse needs and expectations of your target users.

3. Design and User Interface (UI):

To envision what users will come across through your travel app, you should focus on the design and user interface (UI). Make sure that your travel app attracts users and keeps them engaged. The design should be aesthetically pleasing with high-quality graphics, typography, and colors.

The design of your app should reflect your brand identity. Keep the interface intuitive but simple so that users should be able to guide through the app effortlessly. Prioritize a visually appealing interface by organizing information logically and putting essential features vividly.

4. Navigation and User Flow:

Ensure that your users can easily navigate into the app without any confusion. Create a user flow to understand how the users will navigate the different stages of interaction through the app and complete the task.

Maintain consistency in design segments such as buttons, icons, and menus in the app to avoid confusion. This will help your users predict where to find specific features and functionalities.

Your travel apps’ user flow should guide users seamlessly from one screen to another. It’s vital to ensure that each step in the user flow contributes to a satisfying user journey and leads to successful task completion.

5. Mobile Responsiveness:

It is crucial to verify whether your travel app supports multiple devices or not. Check the layout and functionality on different devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Ensure that your app adapts well to differing screen dimensions.

Thoroughly test the app on both iOS and Android operating systems to find and address any errors or bugs. Evaluate your app’s performance, speed, responsiveness, and other aspects on different versions of Android and iOS to confirm its compatibility across a wide range of devices.

6. Functional Testing:

This step is vital for your travel app as it involves a systematic evaluation of each feature and functionality within your app. From user interface and backend process to function failures and application performance, the testers team should verify that every component operates as intended.

The functional testing team should ensure that software functions according to user expectations. The goal is to validate that the software’s features and functions align with your travel app’s objectives, adhering to design specifics and providing a positive user experience.

7. Performance Optimization:

The next step will be the performance optimization of your travel app. This will ensure smooth transitions between apps’ screens and actions.

Performance optimization involves code optimization, efficient asset management, algorithm optimization, and data compressing. This results in speeding up the overall performance, reducing the loading times, ensuring responsiveness, and seamless user experience.

8. Security and Privacy:

Implementing robust security measures and keeping up with privacy standards and regulations are crucial parts of safeguarding your user’s data within the app. Providing end-to-end encryption to users will ensure that unauthorized person can’t access users’ data without their permission.

Install firewalls and authentication mechanisms, like Passwords, biometrics, or other-factor authentications, to monitor and control security threats.

9. App Monetization Strategy:

Selection of a monetization model that aligns with your travel app’s nature, target user, and goal is crucial.

Offering users, the option to purchase additional features, online products, or premium content that users may be willing to pay for. Subscription-based models, VIP plans, and advertisements can generate revenue.

After implementing a monetization model, test the effectiveness of the model. This will help to create a sustainable and booming revenue stream for your travel app.

10. User Feedback and Beta Testing:

Pre-release a beta version of your travel app among a group of selected users to test and gather feedback. Establish precise channels for communication to collect users’ feedback.

Categorize the feedback into different areas based on performance, usability, expected features, and bugs.

After the collection of feedback, implement the changes and updates in the app. This approach will ensure that your app is thoroughly examined before the final app launch.

11. App Store Optimization (ASO):

ASO is an essential strategy to enhance your travel app’s visibility and discoverability within the app stores.

Identify and integrate relevant keywords that users likely use while searching a travel app. So that you can strategically place these keywords in your app’s title, description, or app’s metadata to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) within the app store.

Ensure that your travel apps’ metadata is accurate and regularly updated with all the suitable information that users view before downloading an app.

Use high-quality visuals, like screenshots, icons, and promotional images, to showcase your travel app’s features and UI. By doing all this, you can ultimately enhance the overall success and reach of the travel app.

12. Marketing and Promotion:

Develop a pre-launch marketing strategy for your app.

For the same, clearly define your app’s services and write a compelling message that resonates with your target audience.

Leverage social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) to attract the target audience by developing engaging and shareable content, like videos, images, teasers, and posts.

Interact with your audience by responding to their comments, creating a sense of community.

You can also collaborate with famous influencers and celebs whose followers align with your target audience. Build a subscriber list and send them teasers, newsworthy information, exclusive content, and countdowns to create a buzz and generate curiosity in their mind.

13. Analytics Integration:

To gain insights into how users interact with your app, you have to integrate analytics tools into the app, which will collect, analyze, and interpret data related to user behavior.

Here are some commonly used tools:

Integrate APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provided by your chosen analytics tools to collect relevant data points, like page views, user clicks, session duration, and other user interactions.

Determine metrics that match your defined goals and convert selected metrics to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). The KPIs will help you measure the success of your travel app.

Some metrics that you should track to gauge success are:

1. Acquisition- See from where your users get familiar with your app. Identify from where they are discovering and downloading the app, like social media ads, organic search, influencer marketing, user referrals, or email marketing. These metrics will help you know the number of times your travel app has been downloaded.

2. Activation Rate- This metric will tell you the percentage of your app downloads. The 85% or above activation rate means you’re doing great. For new apps, this rate is between 5-15%.

3. Retention Rate- In simple terms, retention equals revenue. This metric evaluates how often users return to your app. The higher the retention rate, the more the chances of the app’s success.

4. User Engagement- The number of daily active users and how long they interact, or an average session lasts within the app.

5. Uninstalls– It will help you gather data on how many users uninstall your app on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

6. Drop-offs: You will know if users are performing any activity in the app or exiting the app without engaging in any activity.

7. Reachability- Percentage of users who click on push notifications, email links, and in-app notifications.

14. Legal and Compliance:

The second last point in this checklist is ensuring that your travel app follows all the regulations and requirements applicable to launch, including local, national, and international laws.

Additionally, if your app involves financial transactions, it should comply with applicable financial restrictions.

Include disclaimers and terms of service (ToS) to inform and agree users to obey the correct use of your travel app.

Define a privacy policy that outlines how you handle users’ data, how you use it, and any 3rd-party with whom it might be shared.

By complying with laws, you can protect your business from potential liabilities and establish fair and transparent terms of engagement with users.

15. Launch Plan:

The last pointer in this checklist is planning your App Launch.

Schedule a specific date and time that matches with marketing and business goals. Discuss the launch date for your travel app with all relevant teams, including development, marketing, sales, and customer support.

The initial launch phase is crucial to observe and assess your app’s performance, ensuring it meets your target user’s expectations. You can set up a dedicated team to monitor and respond to performance issues. Collect user feedback and reviews to identify user concerns and areas of improvement.

Conclusion

These are the pre-launch checklist points you can refer to before launching your travel app. Here, you can get a step-by-step guide to successfully launching your app without any hurdles.

To get more information on this or to develop a travel app, be in touch with Codiant. It is a leading mobile and web app development company, helping small, medium, and giant enterprises by developing and launching their app successfully in the market.