The tourism industry is one of the biggest and most profitable in the world. However, this profitability also has some side effects, such as over tourism of popular places. Popular cities are becoming incredibly crowded and as a result residents lose desire to live there. This outflux of residents can cause problems for the local economy, and can potentially cause a loss of authenticity.
There are also different people with different travel interests, some of which want to stay away from these tourist cities and experience the real culture of a country, which usually involves getting off the beaten path, the so-called backpackers. This category of travellers is decreasing in numbers every year.
Then there’s the global situation at the time of writing this report: the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it dangerous for people to stay in crowded places due to high infection rates. This has also driven the tourism industry down, having a huge impact not only on local economies, but also those in charge of moving people, such as airplane companies.
The aim of this project is to create a system which encourages its users to get off the beaten path and visit different places, reducing over tourism and promoting local culture. There are existing systems in the world which deal with places and exploration, such as Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, etc. While these systems offer the functionality to see and add places, they are intended for people to “find places to eat and things to do around you or when you travel”.
Also, these existing systems, despite having billions of users, most of them only use the apps for navigation. For example, Google Maps has over 1 billion active monthly users, 87% of which only use the app for directions.
The system is aimed at regular people and backpackers who want to explore places that are more authentic, less popular and less crowded.