John has been a white-collar worker in Shanghai, China for 3 years since he graduated from university. Travelling is always his favourite recreation and he usually spend around 1 month every year for his trips. After travelling several times in group tours booked from travel companies, he feels quite unsatisfied. Though group tour provides one-stop service and packages with cheaper price, the monotony and stiff schedules of those group tours absolutely lack of personalization as well as deep touching culture of the destinations. Rather than simply shooting photos in front of those classic and famous attractions, John sometimes prefers visiting villages and mountains more, where he could have a chance to enjoy interacting with local residents and experiencing some portion of real local lives. Furthermore, he also wishes to make friends worldwide, with whom he can share the joy of travelling and even sometimes travel in companion. However, traditional websites of travel service providers or companies only focus on selling products and publishing product-related information and recommendations. Therefore, John wants to find a website that meets his following exceptions: (1)having a community of travel enthusiasts; (2)providing lots of valued journals, articles, photos and recommendations about destinations; (3)offering space to share own experience with friends; (4) providing a good platform for Foreign Independent Travel organizations; (5)viewing and updating website contents and keeping in touch with fellow members via mobile apps everywhere instead of requiring access to computers and the internet; and (6)necessarily providing some promotions and price comparisons of numerous travel companies.
Fortunately, on the platform of our newly developed GO2GETHER application, John is able to realize his wishes. Firstly, after becoming a member of this application, he can allow the system to search the contacts of his several email accounts to find his friends who are already members of this system as well as sending invitations to others who are not members. And then the system will automatically list the travel plans of his friends. In this way, John gets to know his friends’ travel plans and thus he may choose to contact them if he is interested in joining any of their plans. Secondly, comparisons of rates of hotels, air ticket fares and so on are provided by travel agencies for his reference and booking. All the preparations including travel planning, hotel and flight booking, etc., will be easily done on this platform and he can soon start travelling with his friends. On the way of his trips, the mobile app mTravel will become his powerful tool as a travel assistant which will provide information of destinations such as descriptions, tips, attractions, dining, weather, and traffic condition, etc. as well as keep his communication with friends via position sharing and voice messaging functions.