Gaia: Solo Travel Companion

Inspiration

As soon as I listened to Gabby's brief it instantly resonated with me. We all have these big dreams and ideal lifestyles but getting there seems like you have a mountain to climb which can be a daunting task.

That's why I loved Gabby's suggestion of gamifying the process and rewarding achievements no matter how big or small they are.

What it does

The app has an onboarding flow to understand more about the user and personalise the app to them. We then take this idea of gamification and provide the user with a personalised roadmap to take them from travel novice to nomad in no time. Each step has a serious of tasks for the user to complete and rewards them after completing each one giving the user a small dopamine boost which to keep them engaged and coming back.

Along with the roadmap we allow users to keep track of and manage upcoming trips enabling them to plan out their itinerary and keep a checklist of must haves. Users can also share their trip with their community getting an instantly shareable picture asking their community for their recommendations.

We want the user to feel rewarded for hitting their milestones which is why we have the bucket list section where users can keep track of their goals no matter how big or small. When a user completes one of their goals, they get rewarded and are able to share this achievement with their community.

How we built it

I built this app using React Native & Expo along with the RevenueCat integration for handling purchases.

Challenges we ran into

• Generating bespoke pieces of content so users can share their achievements with their communities
• Creating the personalised roadmap screen along with animations to ensure the experience is engaging for users

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Providing an engaging user experience for users, continually rewarding them ensuring they stay motivated and on track to achieve their goal. This includes bespoke animations and haptic feedback for users similar to apps such as Duolingo.
• Making it effortless for users to share their wins with their community on social media

What we learned

• Learned key user retention methods from popular apps such as haptic feedback, rewards etc to provide users with small boosts of dopamine to keep them coming back.
• Using RevenueCat's SDK to show paywalls on key actions from within the app but only to non premium users.

What's next for Gaia: Solo Travel Companion

• Adding daily streaks and achievements that users can unlock to further gamify the experience for users and increase user retention.
• Allowing users to add photos taken on their trip and generating videos using these photos to share on social media with their community.
• Integrate with Gabby's PTO (Paid Travel Opportunities) database "seekPTO" to display these to users in the app and send users push notifications when new opportunities arise.

Built With

• expo.io
• react-native
• revenue-cat