bana App

PROBLEM
There are many architecturally significant places that are less known because they are not catalogued in general travel guides such as tripadvisor or google travel and there is no easy channel to access information about visiting them.

SOLUTION
bana is a web and mobile platform for people interested in architectural tourism to access and share information about their favourite destinations and get suggestions based on their personal preferences.

International tourism is a trillion-dollar industry, and it has been growing exponentially in the past few decades. For the last couple of years, travelers have relied on the internet to plan their journeys. Consider Yelp; it helps bring the locals’ knowledge and allows you to have a unique experience food-wise, rather than just going to random touristic ones and probably paying extra for lower quality. That is what we are trying to do with tourism in terms of architecture: to visit unique places that can create a more customized and memorable experience rather than a generic travel plan. The problem is that many architecturally significant places are less well-known because they are not cataloged in general travel guides such as TripAdvisor or Google Travel, and there is no easy channel to access information about visiting them. We are suggesting a web and mobile platform for people interested in architectural tourism to access and share information about their favorite destinations and get suggestions based on their personal preferences.

All you need to do is use your location or search for a city you plan to visit, filter the results based on architectural style, year, or the architect, and save your results in a collection. bana has an expanding database of architecturally significant sites and buildings, including information such as an address, architect, construction year, entrance fee, operation hours, and much more. When you sign up, bana will create a profile based on your preferences and places you have saved and recommend similar buildings.

To better understand our users, we sent out a survey, and we got about 105 responses, of which about 85% were non-architects. About 90% said they travel at least once or twice per year. 93% of non-architects indicated that they do architectural sightseeing on their trips. 61% said “yes” to the question of whether they’ll use a platform for architectural sightseeing, and 81% of them preferred to use an app with ads compared to paying for it. 

Along with studies about our users, we also did studies on our potential customers, who would pay us for advertising. We categorize them as businesses in close proximity to landmarks, local tourism organizations, and local travel service providers. In preparing a financial plan, we have provided estimates of costs and revenues for the first three years. We continue to refine our financial plan to improve the accuracy of our projections. We also had reflections on what values we are delivering to our customers, users, and potential partners. Keeping an eye on our competitors, we think they lack two important features: the community feature that leads to a small database of places to visit (some of them covering only one city), and the other is no personalized recommendations.

We have some ideas about the future directions of development. One adds the ability to find destinations along a route and the other adds augmented reality and virtual reality features.