I am also one of those who love road trips. My favorite mode of transport is a motorcycle. In fact, most of my initial travels across India were on my Royal Enfield motorcycle. But, like most road trippers, I have always struggled to find a simple way in which I can independently plan an interesting road trip itinerary in the matter of a few minutes. Due to lack of resources, I ended up with just a road atlas and a rich zest for adventure. But, not everyone can travel like that. And that is where a solution like GoRoadTrip comes to the rescue.
This young Bangalore headquartered online portal and mobile app allows you to build your own personalized road trip vacations. Unlike standard travel booking websites that allow us to rent cars, book hotels, book activities or book a standard packages, GoRoadTrip.com thinks differently and allows you to plan your own sweet road trip.
I see this innovative product as a game changer in this space. Here are the salient highlights of this GoRoadTrip product and why I think you will fall in love with it.
1) Endless Customization and Personalization
Let’s make one thing clear! All of us love choices. As road trippers, each of us come with a unique set of whims and fancies. This means that, we want to customize our road trip, but due to lack of a solution in the market, we either planned it in our own individual silos or surrendered our fate to the cliche booking sites. That is where GoRoadTrip has created a fantastic platform.
They offer customization to the last degree and the best part is that you can do it yourself either through their online website or their mobile app. To start with, you can choose your destination, your starting point, your preferred maximum one way duration, your month of travel and your preferred holiday theme (temples, beaches, nature, wildlife, etc.) from a list of over 100 cities in South India.
Once you have the basic planning out of the way, the system asks for additional information such as duration of trip, tentative or finalized date of journey, if you wish to stopover for sights enroute or head straight to the destination, your budget type (frugal, economy or luxury) and if you wish to build your own itinerary or choose from the itineraries already in the marketplace for your given route and choice parameters.
If you choose to build your own plan, you can choose everything from the route, the places you wish to see, the hotels you wish to stay in, the restaurants where you wish to stop for an enroute meal, the activities that you want to indulge in and much more. The number of options under each variable is immense and thus allowing you great flexibility.
In a nutshell, it gives you immense flexibility, options and information to help you seamlessly build your own personalized road trip holiday.
2) Great integration with TripAdvisor
These days, most of us invariably check TripAdvisor for reviews and ratings. After all, no one seems to command a more holistic review system of the hotels and tourist attractions across the world. GoRoadTrip extends this TripAdvisor functionality from within its solution. Whether you are choosing a activity, a place to see, a hotel to stay or a restaurant to eat, you can easily check the ratings and review of it on TripAdvisor. This helps in authentic and super quick research.
3) Intelligent Route Planning
Sometimes, we road trippers underestimate terrain difficulty, miscalculate distances, ignore detours and others that lead to significant delays and a trailing set of headaches. GoRoadTrip solution alerts the user of possible mistakes while building your personalized itinerary and thus ensuring a smooth and trouble free road trip.
4) Real Time Connection with Maps
GoRoadTrip allows you to see your entire itinerary through an interactive maps feature either on the web or through the app on your phone. This covers everything from routes, pit stops, places of interest, hotels, destination and much more.
5) Simple and Intuitive Android App
Currently, GoRoadTrip provides all of their amazing functionality for Android users through a great mobile app. From choosing items to building your itinerary and from route maps to a handy travel guide, this guide contains all the user-friendly features of the product. And the best part is that, their mobile app interface is super simple and what I call idiot-proof.
6) Ability to Create Itineraries and Share with Others
Road trips are sometimes big fun when you travel in large groups. But, then there are the hassles of group booking, meeting together to plan, settling accounts and all that, which we all want to skip. What I like about the GoRoadTrip itinerary is that once you build a good plan, you can save it and make available to anybody and that includes your friends, family and other fellow road trippers. Thus, everyone can do their own bookings, planning and preparations. And when you all jam up together, you are just enjoying the well planned road trip.
As you can see, GoRoadTrip is quite an innovative product idea and I see it changing the road tripping landscape in South India, if not the rest of the country as they scale their operations outwards. If you love road trips, you should definitely check them out. Happy road tripping this monsoon!
Disclosure: I have collaborated with GoRoadTrip to provide this detailed review. All the thoughts in this review are strictly my own and based on my assessment of their technology product and services rendered.
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