Tour in taxi...???

There was a new business proposal contest about travel in Korea. I quickly made planed a service using taxi infra and made a design for the service.

1. Overview
2. What was the problem
3. How I solve it.
4. What I’ve learned from it.

1. Overview

I love Korea. I love to travel. There was a business idea contest at the Korea Tourism Organization. Many people don’t know about Korea. For most people, Korea is not the first destination they would go on holiday. In my opinion, Korea is a great place to travel and experience. Even Koreans don’t know how beautiful it is. I and my sister wanted people to know its beauty and joy.

2. What was the problem

We had motivation but I didn’t have any clue where to start. My sister and mother went to ‘Tongyeog, the Naples of Korea’ for three days. They took a taxi. The taxi driver lived there for over 50 years. He suggested to them how about seat back and look around Tongyeog with him and just pay him a wage for a day. It was a quite acceptable price and they didn’t prepare that trip much. So they accepted it. It was a new idea for Koreans. I and my sister reach the idea of connecting people who want private tour and taxi so that we can do business.
However, a similar business run by Seoul City closed the business. in particularly, Seoul has an amazing public transportation system. People living in Seoul and near area don’t need to have a car. We have connection subways and bus lines arriving every 3 to 10 minutes. Also, a taxi fare is quite low comparing to other countries. Plus, Seoul is famous for traffic jam during rush hours. You can be trapped in a road for an hour if you are lucky.

via GIPHY

3. How I solve it

We researched other similar cases in Korea. Busan, Gyeongju and several other cities have those systems already. However, most taxi drivers who offer those kinds of trip promote themselves whit outdated UI design. It looks so outdated so people might wonder does it still available or not.

We put one step forward. We are just connecting people who want to travel to small cities in Korea except for Seoul. People can reach out to the drivers easily. The drivers can get customers consistently if it goes well. Isn’t it brilliant? Trending on the web is quite fast and Koreans care it a lot. It should be at least over a certain extent.

I cared for three points on the main screen.

1. I didn’t want to discriminate Koreans. Not just foreigners travel to Korea. There is a need for a well made domestic travel service.

2. There are over a thousand festivals in South Korea a year. Korean uses ‘Naver’ which is Korean yahoo to gather information like those. I want to include it this site so that users do not need to search about it.

3. I wanted to include beautiful pictures of Korea. Sometimes Koreans don’t realize how beautiful it is.

and here is the result.

4. What I’ve learned from it

It was a great pleasure to find fascinating pictures of Korea. Even for me, I didn’t know that there are so many people who are interested in this project. Unfortunately, it couldn’t win the contest but it was a good opportunity to work.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust