Travel search app
Invention of the first travel app
With the multi-platform travel search app, Salim launched the first ever travel app in the Apple App Store and later also for mobile phones with the Android operating system from Google and for the iPad. Together with Telekom, another version was developed as a SmartTV app for television sets.
Project description
When the first iPhone came onto the market, Salim was a great inspiration and he was impressed by the user guidance and the new technological possibilities that the iPhone brought with its AppStore. The vision of developing a user-friendly and playful travel search app was soon born.
As always, Salim set the standards and the requirements for himself and his team very high. So he designed a surface with a 3D globe that could be rotated with a finger on the iPhone. In the detailed view, you could zoom in with a finger gesture, so that the individual hotels and prices finally appeared on the map.
When displaying the travel offers, he made use of the iPhone's full potential. In landscape format, the hotel images appeared in high-resolution format that could be swiped from right to left with a finger. The application also offers many filter options, an alternative classic list view. It was very innovative and correspondingly complex to implement the direct booking functionality within a mobile phone app. At that time, this corresponded to a unique and absolutely unique selling point, even the following travel apps could not offer in-app travel booking functionality for years.
Examples of operation
Challenge / technology
The challenge was, on the one hand, to develop a three-dimensional globe that can be rotated and in which you could zoom into the map view at a detailed level. In times without Google Earth, the project initially seemed like an impossible task.
Challenge / bookable travel content
The biggest challenge, however, was georeferencing hundreds of millions of travel offers and thousands of hotels in the map. The geographic data of each hotel had to be collected and manually postponed and mapped in the backend system.
Discover in the video the usecase, how the iPad app and HeliView interact with the Smart TV appn
