journey planner project

OpenTripPlanner

Multimodal trip planning.

• Developer & PO Conference

OpenTripPlanner (OTP) is a family of open source software projects that provide passenger information and transportation network analysis services. The core server-side Java component finds itineraries combining transit, pedestrian, bicycle, and car segments through networks built from widely available, open standard OpenStreetMap and GTFS data. This service can be accessed directly via its web API or using a range of Javascript client libraries, including modern reactive modular components targeting mobile platforms.

Launched in 2009, the project has attracted a thriving community of users and developers, receiving support from public agencies, startups, and transportation consultancies alike. OTP powers regional and national journey planning services around the world, as well as several popular multi-city mobile applications.

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How to Build a Trip Planner App for Organizing Travelling?

June 18, 2019

In our new article, we’re discussing how to utilize travel industry insights to create viable travel products, and share our experience of building one.

Mitya Smusin

Planning a trip is just as tiresome as it is pleasant and fun. So many things to be done and kept in mind: stuff to pack, flight tickets, hotel and car reservations, time of check-ins and departures, confirmation numbers, addresses… Preparations turn into a total mess when one tries to keep all this information in perfect order.

A travel planning application can take on this messy part of the travel routine. It can be a nice helping tool to have all of the necessary info in just one place always at hand whenever it is needed. And no more printing out tickets and reservations!

In the article, we’re going to talk about how to build a travel planning app, which features it should possess, and what steps you should take to build a viable product.

Reasons to create a trip planning app

Tourism is on the rise globally. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2018, the number of international tourists increased by 6% compared to 2017, and a 3–4% growth is projected for 2019.

At the same time, traditional types of traveling are being left behind to be replaced by newly emerging alternatives. Earlier, group tours and vacation packages were popular among tourists, but now people prefer to travel independently, solo, or slowly (i.e. stay in the chosen destinations for quite a long time). Let’s take a look at the factors that laid the groundwork for this shift in the preferences of modern travelers:

Growing exposure to travel opportunities. With lots of online travel agents, self-service booking platforms, and travel fare aggregators, people don’t need travel agencies as mediators anymore in order to create traveling experiences.

In 2016, Airbnb conducted its Airbnb and The Rise of Millennial Study among the millennials from the US, the UK, and China. The findings suggest that at least 75% of the respondents prefer to plan trips themselves rather than buying a packaged tour. These findings reflect the shift in the modern traveling paradigm toward more adventurous, personalized, and local experiences — something that traditional holiday packages and all-inclusive tours have always missed.

Craving a “local touch”. As we’ve mentioned in the previous point, people don’t want standardized experiences anymore.

The desire to feel like temporary locals is another reason why modern travelers tend to plan their trips themselves. While planning, they prefer to utilize global platforms facilitating personal connections — Couchsurfing, Airbnb, etc. rather than the help of a third party — a travel agency. Independent research and planning allow them to interact with local communities, try local ways of life, and have local experiences that aren’t possible with an all-inclusive group trip.

Strong reliance on travel tech. Smartphones are becoming the number-one assistant supporting travelers on the road. According to the Google/Phocuswright Travel Study conducted globally in 2017, about half of the respondents in most countries feel comfortable using only smartphones when researching and planning upcoming trips (48% in the US, 45% in the UK and Australia, 53% in South Korea, etc.)

Mobile travel products should not necessarily be top-notch. As the Booking.com study suggests , travelers would rather prefer them to be practical and easy-to-use. For example, 57% of the respondents named a single app that would cover all their trip planning needs among their top preferences.

The described tendencies showcase that travelers are in strong need of advanced tech products that would facilitate the process of trip planning and help travelers get in touch with local communities. So you should take these tendencies into account if you decided to make a travel planner app.

Trip planner app development: what features to include?

Studies and research are the main sources of valuable insights into what users want their ideal travel planning app to be. As a source of additional information, you can also take a look at the best travel planning apps already existing on the market to see what features they have.

Let’s see what basic features you should consider if you decide to build a trip planning app.

1.  Maps are an indispensable part of any trip planning app. Its primary functions are to help users locate themselves in an unknown area, search for directions, or see what places are located nearby . But it can also serve other purposes. Here are some ideas.

TripIt , a well-known trip planner, features interactive maps of airports and terminals. Orienting within an unknown airport can be quite a confusing experience. So detailed maps showing how to reach a necessary gate or terminal in real time can be of great help for users:

Maps can also be a source of amusing statistics for users. For example, App in the Air features a map that visualizes all of the users’ departures and arrivals as dots connected by lines (routes), showing how many times a user went on a trip. The map can also be viewed as a video and even as a globe in the AR mode. A nice way to get inspired by your own trips! You can check how many trips you've made anytime and anywhere, like we did right in our office:)

2. Itinerary is a detailed visualization of user travel plans, step by step, from getting on and off the plane, to taking a shuttle bus from the airport to the city, to checking in the hotel. Itineraries can also include places of interest, restaurants, museums, and other places the user plans to visit. Check out how this was implemented in TripIt, where you can find all of the necessary details: flight number, confirmation numbers, addresses, etc.:

Itineraries can be created manually or automatically. For example, TripIt asks users to forward all of their reservation confirmations to a special email, then parses all of the necessary data from the emails and creates master itineraries for users. Quite an elegant solution to take note of if you want to create a trip itinerary app.

3. Reminders. When trying to keep in mind tons of travel details, there is a good chance of forgetting something: the gate number, check-in time, etc. Checking with the app once in a while can sometimes be a way out, especially when you travel alone. But what if the trip involves a lot of details, people, and places?

In this case, reminders and push notifications about the upcoming check-ins and planned visits are of great help. They can release users from the burden of constantly checking the phone and grant a feeling that everything is under control and goes as expected. Moreover, notifications can sometimes be a source of additional useful info, which, otherwise, could have been missed or obtained with extra effort from somewhere else. With so many details that you need to keep in mind when travelling, a push message can literally save the day if anything changes:

4. Support of voice and digital assistants. Increasingly more people tend to communicate with the tech in natural language. Oliver Heckmann, Google’s VP of engineering for travel and shopping, says that, according to Google global research, at least one in three respondents would prefer to use digital assistants for trip researching and planning.

In this regard, it would be a good idea to integrate your trip planning app with a smartphone assistant. For example, TripIt allows creating Siri shortcuts that help obtain travel info in a quick manner – when asked about the upcoming flight and gate number, Siri obtains the information from TripIt and presents it to the user:

5. Sharing. The ability to share itineraries with co-travelers — friends or family members — is a must in trip planning. Therefore, users can make sure that everyone won’t miss a thing in the upcoming trip and always be kept up-to-date about the trip details. These are the basic features any trip planning app should possess. Below are some additional ones that are not necessary but would be a nice bonus for travelers:

• Packing checklists. The ability to create packing checklists and save templates for different types of trips can save plenty of time and effort, especially for those who travel often. It is also a good idea to send reminders to pack the things that haven’t been checked off the list prior to the trip.
• Travel hints & tips. The recent findings of the global research conducted by Booking.com  suggest that almost a third of the respondents won’t mind if trip planning programs use their previous travel experience to offer ideas and destinations for upcoming trips.
• Flight statistics. You may also include some statictics and interesting details about the flights, like visited countries or preferred airlines:

Steps to build a travel planning app

Once you’ve decided to create a trip planning app, you may find yourself unsure of where to start. Here’s a set of steps that we at Yellow always follow to build a viable product.

1. Brainstorm ideas and research

Before coming up with product concepts, it is a good idea to find out what products the market lacks. After you’ve done the market research, you can use the acquired data to brainstorm ideas for future app functionality.

Remember that the golden rule for building successful products is “one product — one key feature”. A key feature is a core of the product, something that the entire application is based upon. For example, the key feature of TripIt is creating itineraries, of App In The Air — marking flight destinations, etc. So before jumping in travel planning app development, ask yourself: what would be my app’s key feature?

2. Prototype

Prototyping is a nice tool to test product ideas and leverage the power of user feedback at an early stage of product development.

Start with simple black-and-white wireframes — they’re enough for the potential users to evaluate the basic look and feel of your future trip planning app and make sure that the application is well-organized and easy to navigate. Once you’ve tested several ideas and chosen the best one, you can transform a wireframe into an interactive prototype that can be used for further usability tests.

Once the app backbone — a prototype — is created and approved, you can proceed to design a future app interface.

Try to keep your design neat, clean, and intuitive. Remember that sometimes the best interface is not having an interface at all.

4. Develop, review, test, repeat

The next step is to power your design with code. Start with developing a minimum viable product (MVP) with a key product feature — it’s enough to test the app on your target audience, gather and analyze user feedback, and add new features accordingly.

Finally, the world will see your app! However, the successful launch doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels and enjoy your product success. Remember to keep your product up to users’ needs, release timely updates, and fix bugs if there are any.

Do you want to build a travel app?

Our experience

TripLine is a mobile trip planner application that we created for an LA-based startup. Byron Dumbrill, the CEO of TripLine says : “Planning is a creative process”. This is exactly the mission of TripLine — to make the process of trip planning amusing, creative, and fun.

TripLine allows for creating trip itineraries by marking destination points on the map. To add a place, you simply have to find it by its name through the in-app search bar. If the place is found, it automatically appears on the map as a red dot. When there are several dots on the map, they are connected by the line, visualizing the entire route.

To make your itinerary more informative, you can add photos and text to each destination point. The app is integrated with various social media , such as Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, etc. so you can import your photos and check-ins from there into your itinerary. And this is what the TripLine itinerary looks like:

Currently, the product is undergoing beta testing.

Final thoughts

Modern travelers prefer planning trips themselves, rather than reaching a third party  — a travel agency. They need advanced tools to facilitate the process of trip planning and researching.

Once you’ve decided to develop a vacation planning app, look into travel industry insights and the best examples on the market to find out what basic features your app can include.

Before embarking on a trip planner app development, it’s a good idea to research the market to find out what it lacks. Therefore, you’ll be able to give users a product that they really need.

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• Expedia.com
• Booking.com
• Tripavisor.com
• Trivago.com
• Aviasales.com
• Rentalcars.com
• Ticketmaster.com
• Raileurope.com
• BikesBooking.com
• Track Travel Expenses
• 8 /26 Checklist

Creating a trip has never been easier! Tripety is a travel planning platform that makes your trips convenient and hassle-free. Simply enter your travel details and places to visit into our  itinerary planner  to get a clear overview of your journey. Organize each day, use checklists to ensure nothing is forgotten, and keep essential documents all in one place. Also, you can manage and track your spending during your travel. Check out the itinerary maker to see how simple it is!

Want to coordinate travel plans with family, friends, or colleagues? Invite your friends or trip companions to Tripety for an easy way to discuss the details of your journey. Generate ideas or arrangements, track your spending, and use our group travel itinerary planner to explore new places together.

Is the process of planning your favorite part of the trip? Are you a detailed-oriented person who wants to use the  best business travel planner  or organize your family vacation tour? Then Tripety, an online trip management platform, is perfect for you! Dream, organize, share, manage your business and personal trips within our easy-to-use,  intuitive travel itinerary manager as your planner . It will keep all the needed information in one place and track everything, as it’s a flight tracker, road trip planner both in one.

Tripety helps manage and keep track of your finances before and during your journey. Monitor spending with the help of our convenient budget tool. See and manage your expenses ‘as you go’ to stay on top of your budget.

Planning a trip or vacation shouldn’t be tiresome and complicated. Easy to use, an intuitive and neat Travel Planning Platform that we created is for travelers like YOU! Tripety helps you compile, organize, and share your travel arrangements. Keep an eye on your travel budget while on vacation or business trip. We are trying to make your world a bit more colorful and a lot more relaxed. Tripety, add travel to your life!

Planning a trip can become quite challenging, especially when you have to go over many big and small details. The last thing you want is to run into problems while you’re away. This is why you must always plan all the details of your trip beforehand.

Thankfully, now you can use Tripety, a travel planner and itinerary maker, to plan each and every detail of your trip. From budgeting to group collaboration, we ensure that you have a smooth planning process. We also have an online road trip planner that’s sure to give you the hassle-free trip of your dreams.

• --> Trip Wallet Manage Your Travel Expenses
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• Dream Inspiration for Your Next Travel Experience
• Plan Create & Manage Your Trip Plan and Budget for It
• Travel Find Your Past and Upcoming Trips View and Share Travel Itineraries with Fellow Travelers
• Blog Explore Our Travel Blogs or Create Your Own

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Privacy Overview

Trip Planner AI

• Community Trips

Your Next Journey, Optimized

Build, personalize, and optimize your itineraries with our free AI trip planner. Designed for vacations, workations, and everyday adventures.

Trip Planner AI is now part of Layla

Trip Planner AI, the original AI trip planner trusted by millions, is now part of Layla.

Your AI-Powered Trip

The most optimal.

Craft your perfect itinerary with Trip Planner AI. Our advanced algorithms take into account your selected explore-sights, dining, and lodging preferences to create the optimal travel plan tailored just for you.

Get Inspired

Extract valuable travel insights from Instagram reels and TikToks, explore the mentioned explore-sights, and effortlessly include them in your own adventure with Trip Planner AI.

TRIP PLANNER AI

The only tool youll ever need.

Say goodbye to the stress of planning and hello to personalized recommendations, efficient itineraries, and seamless dining experiences.

Optimal Route Planning

Our AI algorithms analyze your preferences to craft the most efficient route, saving you time and effort.

Personalize Your Adventure

Shape your journey by freely adding, editing, or deleting activities from your itinerary.

Local Cuisine Recommendations

Discover local cuisines and hidden gems recommended by our AI, tailored to your taste buds.

Dont take our word for it

See what our users have to say about revolutionizing their travel experiences with Trip Planner AI.

Trip Planner AI saves time and stress by aiding travel planning, relieving indecision or uncertainty.

Trip Planner AI offers diverse planning options in a user-friendly interface. Simplifies travel planning for enthusiasts.

I love traveling but hate planning. This app quickly organizes trip agendas, reducing decision fatigue.

Our Trusted Partners

Journey Inspirations from Travelers

Dive into unique trip itineraries crafted by our global travelers. Find your next adventure and share your own journey with fellow explorers.

Trip to Tokyo

Join me on an exciting 10-day journey through Tokyo, where we'll visit iconic landmarks, indulge in delicious cuisine, and immerse ourselves in the vibrant culture of Japan's capital city.

Trip to Dubai

Embark on a thrilling 6-day journey through Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Explore vibrant souks, iconic landmarks, world-class shopping, and enchanting attractions. Join us as we uncover the hidden gems and unforgettable experiences that Dubai has to offer.

Trip to New York

Experience the best of New York City in just 7 days! Explore iconic landmarks, indulge in delicious meals, and immerse yourself in the vibrant culture of the city that never sleeps.

Trip to Rome

Join me on a thrilling 5-day adventure in Rome, where we'll explore ancient ruins, marvel at stunning architecture, and indulge in mouthwatering pizza. Get ready for an unforgettable experience!

Customized Itineraries for Every Travel Dream

Trip Planner AI is your ultimate companion for any travel scenario. Whether it's a solo adventure, a family vacation, or a group expedition, our app tailors every aspect of your journey. Experience the convenience of:

AI-Powered Route Optimization

Utilize AI for optimal travel routes. Our app ensures a seamless journey, calculating the best paths, travel times, and distances for city tours or cross-country road trips.

All-in-One Travel Organizer

Simplify travel planning with our all-in-one platform. Trip Planner AI consolidates hotel and flight details, manages bookings, and imports tips and guides. Organize all trip details in one place.

Collaborative Group Planning Made Easy

Collaborate on itineraries with companions. Our real-time feature makes group travel planning effortless, ensuring everyone stays informed and involved in the process.

• Trip Planner

Trip Planner | Travel Itinerary Planner | Plan a Trip

Are you looking for an itinerary planner to plan your next trip? We know creating a customized travel itinerary manually is an overwhelming task. You have to put a lot of time into selecting destinations, booking hotels, flights, and comparing prices. On top of that calculating budgets & booking hotels and flights is another challenge that makes itinerary planning tough.

But what if all of this is done within a few minutes for you? Yes with TripHobo trip planner you can do this smartly. We have observed that many travelers end up spending more time in researching information than enjoying the actual trip. Not only first-time travelers but also experienced travelers struggle in creating perfect travel plans.

Even though it is a tedious task to create a customized itinerary, everyone agrees on the importance of itinerary for an enjoyable holiday. So Triphobo came up with this easy to use automatic itinerary planner.

How Trip Planner Works / Steps to Plan a Trip

Do you want to create your travel itinerary quickly & easily? Are you ready to use this tool now? TripHobo's trip planner plays a major role to ease the itinerary creation process and helps you overcome the pain in the trip planning .  Follow these 4 simple steps to plan a trip & let us know your experience.

1) Choose Your Destination & Dates when you want to travel

Visual algorithmic trip planner lets you choose destinations you want to travel to. You have the freedom to choose the real dates from the calendar. After selecting travel dates, planner runs algorithms to optimize a trip. It starts suggesting activities, sightseeing spots, tours and transport options with the details. For every attraction, it suggests open/close timings, time to spend, and nearby restaurants.

You can drag & drop activities and complete your itinerary within a matter of minutes. You can book yourself a nice vacation once you are sure of all the details, making you plan your trip very easily.

2) Refer to User Created Itineraries

If you have a lot of travel ideas but confused about where to start? Don't worry. Thousands of other people have visited the same destination before and created itineraries with us. Choose from a pool of more than 1 million user-generated itineraries around the globe. You can view other travelers’ itineraries for any location and duration to inspire yourself and then customize them to suit your own preferences.

3) Book Hotels and Flights

TripHobo always tries to offer the best from the travel industry to our valued planners. It has formed alliances with Expedia , Skyscanner, Zomato and Booking.com. Its ratings and reviews come courtesy of TripAdvisor whereas Google (as well as other partners) powers its location data.

TripHobo aims to cater to travelers at every stage of the travel planning process. It provides one platform to create personalized itineraries and hassle-free bookings .

4) Get Ready with a Perfect Itinerary

Once you’ve created your customized itinerary, you can print it. Save your plan for future reference or share it with your friends. When you’re ready, you can finalize and have a perfect travel itinerary ready.

Why Is TripHobo a Smart Trip planner?

There are few things included in the Triphobo planner algorithm & app which builds itinerary within minutes.

• A free virtual map-based trip planner with a smart algorithm
• International trip planner with about 1,50,000 popular destinations
• The largest repository of user-generated itineraries
• Hassle-free booking options for hotels, tours & flights
• Provides local transit options like metro, rail, bus, and car
• Calculates an estimated budget
• Provides options to save, print and share itinerary
• Strategic Partnerships with leading travel companies

TripHobo: Around the Web

• Trip of Your Own
• Traveling made easier with TripHobo
• Making The Southeast Asian Travel Connection
• Ex-HCL employee’s led ‘TripHobo’ is on a mission to become a global brand – a goto place for travel planning!
• Interview: Praveen Kumar, Founder & CEO of TripHobo
• TripHobo inks partnership with Zomato
• How a trip planning startup can succeed
• Karthik Ramachandram Co-Founder COO, TripHobo - Phocuswright Conference

Here's what travelers have to say about our travel planner

• Excellent 238

Great and genuinely wonderful website that makes a proper vacation plan simple, like it should. All reviews are 5 stars. The only suggestion I have to enhance this fantastic website is to include a mobile application. Even paying for a version without ads wouldn't bother me.

Every traveller should use this!

So much easier & more helpful than a travel agency, given lots of fantastic ideas, and was extremely helpful for planning the trip. Would strongly advise my family and friends to use this!

Great tool for trip planning. Impportantly it's free and automatically tailors travel plans to your preferences and is completely customisable. The integration with skyscanner and booking.com, and other OTA like priceline and expedia makes it very easy to plan the whole trip along with the bookings in one place.

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Project Idea | (Trip Planner)

This project is basically an application which helps friends, colleagues or relatives who live at far off places (generally in another country) plan a trip together to a place in optimal budget.

Use Case One friend lives in Delhi and another in London. They aspire to go for a vacation to a 3 rd city. So they put in the details of their respective current locations into the application along with the starting date and duration of the trip. On click of Submit, they are presented with options like “Paris”, “Dubai”, “Abu Dhabi”etc. sorted according to the total budget. The budget includes the costs of their respective flights to and fro, accommodation, average food costs etc.

• The factors to be included in calculating the budget can be customized. For example, in addition to already mentioned costs, other costs like international calling card’s cost, Airport pick and drop taxi cost etc. can be added.
• Once the user decides upon the trip to go for, the user will be presented an option to book flight tickets directly from the application.
• The application can act as single solution to cater to all needs of the trip like booking the taxi for pick and drop, buying calling cards, booking the hotel, Visa information, weather details etc.
• Feedback about the trip can be taken after the trip from the user which can be shown to future users for their ready reference.

Technologies: For Web application, the front end can be developed using any JavaScript/HTML based framework like Ext JS, Angular JS. In case of android app, Java is the only option. For backend, PHP can be used to interact with Database.

Research More options can be provided to the users like integration with social networks. For example checking the recently visited places by friends on Facebook to get the first hand trustworthy feedback about the planned trip. Also different algorithms can be developed to design the travel itinerary.

About the author:

“Harshit is a technology enthusiast and has keen interest in programming. He holds a   B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from JIIT, Noida and currently works as Front-end Developer at SAP. He is also a state level table tennis player. Apart from this he likes to unwind by watching movies and English sitcoms. He is based out of Delhi and you can reach out to him at  https://in.linkedin.com/pub/harshit-jain/2a/129/bb5

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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sanganimukesh0101/Metro-Journey-Planner

Folders and files, repository files navigation, metro journey planner.

Built a project using C++, which finds shortest and most economical path between two travel destinations on Delhi metro. Dijkstra’s algorithm was used to find the most economical path and shortest was found using BFS of the metro map.

It also finds nearest metro station to popular tourist dstinations like India Gate.

To run the appliction run execute following commands in terminal

• g++ metro.cpp
• Then do as menu directs.

Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.