Share your flight experiences

Thousands of people travel by aircraft day by day around the world. More and more of these travelers share their experiences via social media platforms by creating Trip reports (aka flight reviews). I'm was one of those people, and that's why I worked on a YouTube channel with some friends I met at the airport back in 2014. Since then, this channel (Simply Aviation ) has grown to more than 615K subscribers, which brought us to build a platform for this growing community to serve their needs and wishes even better.

📖 Continue reading if you are

interested in the whole journey of including multiple dead ends.

✈️ Watch a handpicked tripreport of us

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🎥 Enjoy our explainer video

see the video we created to raise money on Kickstarter. Click here →

The story of Simply Tripreports

This case study includes how Simply Trip reports evolved from a group of young aviation enthusiasts who met at the airport while taking pictures of airplanes to a large software project, including planning and realizing a Kickstarter campaign. It was a challenging journey where we could learn a lot of things on the fly. How we did this is structured in:

1. an introduction, giving some background

2. the challenge we were trying to solve

3. the solution, how we build the platform

You will read about several attempts we’ve tried to realize this idea and how my intensive ambition led me to learn programming to build the prototype, which I completely threw away later because I was lucky to convince a classmate who is a much better software developer than me.

Introduction

The starting point of Simply Aviation was a group of young aviation enthusiasts who had met at the airport while taking pictures of airplanes. At some time, we decided to start a Youtube channel together with the name Simply Aviation , where we upload videos from our journeys in the form of Trip reports. Our goal was to provide helpful information and first-hand experience reports of as many different airlines as possible. Today, there are more than 300 reports from over 200 other airlines available to watch, and the number is constantly growing. So that one day, you can point at any aircraft and be sure there will be a report about what it's like to fly on it!

The Challenge

Over time, we constantly discussed ways to provide an even better experience for our growing community. We talked to our subscribers many times and found out that the search function on Youtube is a big problem. The algorithm on YouTube decides which videos are the most relevant for their search, but that might not always be the right one. It’s pretty standard that you receive a result for an entirely different video on another booking class.

When we decided to work on this problem, we were faced with a challenge we were not aware of. We knew how to produce beautiful videos, but we didn't know what it meant to build a platform and the tasks and troubles this project would provide.

Solution

Simply Trip reports is a web platform for creators to submit Tripteports to reach a larger audience. The number of views or subscribers shouldn’t be a significant factor for a suitable placement when searching for a specific Trip report. This should give creators a new opportunity to increase the number of views and boost the awareness of their channel. Interested passengers can search for a specific flight to get a realistic and authentic review of the offered board service and to help them in their decision process for one or another airline.