Results of the Users Survey for Midway

A month has passed since I wrote about my side-project. Not for a lack of motivation but more time. I travelled for work for 2 weeks in August and now I’m on vacation for most of September. In the future, if people are interested, I will write how I set up a routine to work on this project, but in a nutshell, travel is not helping in keeping up with the rhythm I found previously.

Last time I mentioned that I conducted a user survey while travelling. I also did one in Montreal: during a sunny day, I went to a park where I gave people there the QR-code to fill out the survey.

Now I can give some details about this mystery project called Midway and the results of this survey.

My idea is to help people find a destination for their next trip. This is not about AI! This is for a specific type of trip: one where several people are traveling to the same place where none of them are living. I do it with my best friend: I live in Montreal, he lives in Toulouse. The idea is to spend a long weekend together. To maximize this time, what are the cities with a direct flight from both our home airport (or railway station)?

This is surprisingly not an easy question to answer. The AI bots will give partial responses with the usual suspects in terms of airlines hubs. The travel websites will give you the direct flights but only from one particular city, not several. And there’s some friction associated with the existing booking flows, for example, they ask you to specify a date of travel. You can choose one randomly but what if a destination is served only on a particular set of days in the week or weeks in the year? This is a painful and trial-and-error kind of process.

This is maybe only a problem of mine but I can think of people in the same situation: a group of friends planning a getaway weekend, old friends from the university who are now living in different cities, family reunion, parents visiting their adult children in a different country/region or a company or team retreat.

I set up a quick survey (5 questions) to evaluate my intuition that is not only a « me problem ». I’m not sure how many cards I distributed (around 250) but I got 36 surveys filled.

The first question was « Have you ever organized or participated in this kind of trip? », I was surprised to see that almost everyone has (92%). This is good news to me since it means that this is not a type of trip that is rarely done.

I asked also the number of people that participated in the trip, the vast majority (73%) is between 2 and 4 people.

Now, for the last question, I think I made a mistake by asking how would they rate the organization. The question is too vague. I should have narrowed down to how easily it was to find the destination because organizing includes a lot of tasks that are not relevant to my idea. The results are also surprising to me, with a vast majority of people giving a high rating to the experience which means that maybe the current solutions are good enough.

I also had a couple of open-ended questions about the tools used to find the destination and the criteria to select it. Here it also confirmed my hypothesis : Google Flights, Kayak, Skyscanner are mentioned with a couple of replies including ChatGPT. The criteria will give some ideas on how to help narrow down the results : equal time and budget, weather and type of activities offered.

If I continue, the next step is to scope a first version that I can make public. I will offer a very minimal set of features because the hard part is going to be discoverable by the users so it means working a lot on SEO, GEO Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).