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“Be a traveller, not a tourist…”
It would appear our war cry for better e-governance isn’t going entirely unheard. At least not at a more central level of governance, anyway. A few weeks ago, we were fawning over their elaborately designed MakeInIndia website, in the hopes of enticing foreign investors to the country, and now they’ve taken things up a notch with an authority travel app for androids that’s making an indelible mark on both design and interface fronts.
Post the dispatch, Parvez Dewan, Secretary of the Ministry Of Tourism revealed that “The Android Application offers explorers a novel arranging knowledge, and setting out to and inside India will be at the vacationers fingertips.” He also added that “the value affectability peculiarity offered in the product will help individuals to arrange occasions according to their funding.”
Introducing Tripigator...
Conceptualized and created by IIT-Kharakpur alumni Mukul Garg, Piyush Grover, and Karteek Narumanchi, it is designed to add multiple layers to otherwise drab, typically ‘tourist’ activities, and allows users to customize their trips in and around India by adding destinations, interests, costs and even ‘energy levels,’ similar to what their website has been doing for over a year now. All such options allow you to choose from a spectrum as well so if you are, for example, deciding how much energy you’d like to expend on your trip, you can choose all the way from ‘relaxed’ to ‘active.’ Or interests could be anything from ‘adventure’ to ‘romance.’ A particularly nice touch, we thought.
View their explanatory video below:
Once Tripigator has all your preferences, it compiles and analyses all the parameters to create a personalised travel agenda and best of all, computes the tentative costs which include flights, stay and possible activities. This can then be edited manually to make changes in certain details as you choose, and according to user reviews it keeps improving with further usage.
From here on forth, the user can share the itinerary via social media, or invite friends to their plan for collaboration purposes and make it a group trip.
Homegrown’s Review:
Post sifting through the app in varying degrees of detail, we did realise that most of its suggestions are still extremely mainstream and just as easily found with a quick google search so it’s of far better use for annual family vacation planning rather than a real journey to discovery. But let’s not forget that it’s making the information far quicker and easier to access.
What we loved, however, was the easy navigation (hardly any annoying quirks) the huge bank of content that goes beyond just the basics to offer more options to a traveller than any other apps we’ve found here, and the overall visual aesthetics, which go well beyond the countless other forgettable apps on the ‘Incredible India’ roster.
As far as we’re concerned, we can see a lot of people finding this app very useful in smartphone savvy India. It’s a compelling effort by the Indian government and we hope that they keep steering their swanky ride down this progressive road. While they’re at it, perhaps they could work on an app that warns you about the potholes ahead.
