The Traveler App is a custom app that Famously Simple LLC will create just for your community.
It weaves all of the great entertainment, culture, history, food, sports and recreation in your town into getaways that visitors will find irresistable.
Unlock Tourism Dollars in your community with the
About the Traveler App.
The Traveler App is a smart travel planner for iPhone.
It plans getaways for visitors to your community using a sophisticated algorithm and a database of activities. Famously Simple LLC provides a start-to-finish service of creating the app and content, submitting it to the app store, and maintaining it.
This page explains the features of the app, the secrets of the content and algorithm that drives it, and our client-focused process for building it. All the images you see are from our Georgia Lake Country Traveler app, a new app we are producing to showcase the beauty of Lake Country in Central Georgia.
Pages.
Browse what your community has to offer with the app's front pages.
The Feed.
Tap an item to find out more and book it if you're interested.
When you're ready, let the app create an adventure-packed getaway.
Create a Getaway.
 Get Ready PageIntroduces your getaway and provides hotel information and a map of your hotel. |  Day 1Recommends a book for casual reading, breakfast, a morning activity, lunch, an afternoon activity, and dinner. |  Day 2Recommends another fun day, this time in another part of the community. |
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 Day 3By default, the getaway is for the coming weekend, but you can change the start and end dates as you please. |
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Fully Mapped Out.
Each day has a map from breakfast to dinner, so you can find your way.
The map is integrated with Apple's Maps app to ensure smooth navigation.
Customize your Day.
You can tailor your day by swiping left and right. Each time slot in the day has many choices.
Summary vs. Story
You can switch between a summary view of the getaway, or a story view.
Story view lays out your whole day, and lets the reader dive into the hidden treasures of the community.
Our algorithms make sure getaways are hassle-free and tuned to your visitors.
The Brain of the App.
Flexible.
Most communities are packed with hidden treasures. The shack that sells the best barbeque in the world. The tire swing at the park down by the river where sunlight finds its way through the big oak trees in the Fall. The summer tomato festival. The app's algorithm for building getaways knows about all of these treasures, and weaves them into the story, making sure that your whole community is explored and appreciated.
Questionnaire.
A sense of place.
Focused on the Whole Community.
One of the best features of the Traveler App is the questionnaire, which is accessible on the main page. It asks a series of questions that allow the app to learn the user; questions like if they like long relaxing breakfasts, or classical music, or blues, or baseball. Users can answer they are either not a fan, fan, or super fan. The questionnaire just takes a few minutes to do, but the results provide valuable information to the getaway builder algorithm, and lead to remarkably well-tuned adventures customized to the user.
No one wants to spend their getaway stuck in the car. The getaway builder algorithm takes this into account and plans days that keep you in the same part of town, only including long drives when they are scenic and add to the adventure. The goal is to make everyday feel like a journey to get to know a neighborhood, or special feature of your community.
The algorithm can't always get it exactly right. Perhaps you'd like to try something that's outside your comfort zone, or that's in another location. The app lets you customize any activity in your daily adventures by just swiping left or right. Every time slot in each day has a list of activities that are ranked according to how much the algorithm thinks you'll like them. Swiping left or right shows you the complete list of options. Once you settle on an option, the app recalcuates your day, including distance traveled and map updates. It also makes sure that you won't repeat the activity again.
The key to a great getaway is to capture the imagination of the traveler.
The Heart of the App.
When all the entries come together into a getaway, you haven't done your job unless the reader wants to get in their car and get started immediately. To get there, you need a great story.
The story is truly the heart of the getaway, and is our total focus in building you app. From our initial discussions with you, to the research we do on your community, to the visits we make to your town, we continue to look for what makes your town special.
Our process converts the raw wonder of your town into words and images on the screen, and fires the imagination of your potential visitors.
Check out the description of our process below to see how it all works.
Story.
Voice.
Each getaway in the app is composed of entries for breakfast, lunch, dinner, movies, theater, sporting events, and everything your community has to offer. In other sites on the internet, reviews of these activities are written by a wide variety of people. The writing ranges in quality and focus.
Your traveler app needs to have a single voice. Each getaway should sound as though it has been written by the same author, with a consistent turn of phrase and sense of humor.
With the traveler app, our team of authors craft each entry to ensure this consistency, and that each entry shines.
To your community's custom content, the app also adds high quality feeds such as the New York Times best sellers list, highly rated movies from rotten tomatoes, and great concerts from Seat Geek.
Great photos make or break the travel planning experience. For the traveler, being able to see what your community has to offer in high quality, well-composed imagery is key. As we build your traveler app, we will focus on bringing only the most eye-catching imagery into your database.
Our guidelines stress people and natural beauty focused images, with bright colors, sharp focus, high resolution, and strong use of foreground/background contrast. These guidelines ensure every image in your app pops and leads the traveler to read more.
We use images you provide, images we collect from research into your community, and even images we take ourselves when we visit your community.
Imagery.
Our Process and Costs.
Famously Simple LLC will build the app for you and publish and maintain it in the app store.
Our service is focused on giving you a start-to-finish client experience, where your provide us your goals and guidance for the app and we do the rest.
The process to get the app up and running lasts about 8-12 weeks.
First, check out some other apps we've produced, to get a feel for the experience. We recommend another travel app we produced called Here's What You Do. You can download it in the app store free.
When you're ready, give us a call. We'll meet with you and get to know your goals for the app. Then, we'll develop a prototype of the app. We find it's essentialy to build a prototype, so that you can see how the app looks and feels and so we can work together to customize it to be perfect for your community. Our research in building the prototype will include a visit to take photos, talk to the folks, and learn about the magic in your town.
We'll then demonstrate the prototype to you and get your feedback. We have a lot of freedom at this point to change the design, and we'll use it to make sure that you're happy with the final product.
Once we've agreed on the prototype, we'll get into the process of generating your content. Most communities need a minimum of 150 entries to make a rich enough database to build good getaways. We'll produce the entries and share them with you as we go.
We'll also submit the app to the App Store at this time and make sure it's on schedule for roll out.
The key to good app development is testing, and we'll do a ton of it as we generate your content. When we're done, and you've signed off, we'll roll out the app.
A great advertising campaign is essential for making sure an App succeeds, and our service includes making sure your app gets noticed. The campaign details depend on your location and the type of activities you offer in your community, but the key is to pick your advertising avenues shrewdly and leverage as many contacts with the internet media world (bloggers, journalists, etc.) as possible.
The initial package includes maintenance for 12 months, which includes 25 additional entries in the database as well as regular status and usage reports, and maintenance of the app in the App Store.
After the first year, we offer a 12-month renewable package for regular maintenance that includes on-going content generation, app maintanance, and reporting.
$4999
Initial Package
$499
per year maintenance
Our initial start-to-finish app development package builds your Traveler app, gets it in the App Store, maintains it with regular new content, and provides you regular feedback on App usage.
The initial package includes:
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Branding.
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Developing the app with customizations for your community.
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Authoring content about your town (maximum 150 entries).
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Submitting the app to the app store.
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Running the advertising campaign for the app.
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12 months of maintaining the app with regular usage reports.
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25 additional entries over 12 months after roll out.
The on-going maintenance package covers a 12 month period and includes:
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App udates to maintain original functionality
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Running the advertising campaign for the app.
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12 months of maintaining the app with regular usage reports.
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25 additional entries.
To get started, give us a call.
We're Steve and Andrea Bourne of Famously Simple LLC.
Steve has 18 years of experience as a custom software and app developer. His prototyping process has been used in dozens of apps, websites, and desktop software focused on marketing, personal finance, productivity, engineering, science, and data visualization applications.
Andrea has two decades of experience as an author, educator, editor, higher education adminstrator, course developer, and fine artist. She has extensive experience in community development, analytics, and marketing.
We also happen to be married!
We're unapologetic foodies. We love baseball games and Broadway shows and crawfish boils and great books and speakeasies. Most of all, we love to travel, and we love to try new things.
We've been working on the Traveler App and products like it for years now, and we will bring our sense of adventure, enthusiasm, and professionalism to your community's app.
You can reach us at support@famouslysimple.com, or give us a call at 478.250.3994.
