Finding meetup locations

[Stef]

As a People team, we’ve been involved with a few group travel requests recently, and we’ve realised that even if vaccination campaigns are well on their way in most countries, planning travel is still really complicated. After spending hours trying to come up with suggestions for a team meetup with participants from 4-5 different countries, we came across Troop - a company hailing from enterprise travel, currently building a product to facilitate team meetups locations for Remote SMB’s.

Troop is giving us free access in exchange for live testing and feedback. Their product seems pretty neat, and it gives insights not just on restrictions and Covid-related numbers, but also on reducing carbon footprint and cost-efficiency .

Getting started:

Create an account here using your status.im email address

Intro video (4 minutes, worth watching)

More info

Written User guide

The interface allows you to choose multiple origins and how many people are departing from each:

Enter at least one potential destination and you will get a few options that you can select and analyze:

You’ll see the (relative) Covid risk score, applicable restrictions (known at time of search - unfortunately it doesn’t predict the future), required Visas, carbon footprint, and cost efficiency of any of the options:

You can use the map to get more details on the restrictions in each city for one or more of your travelling party:

Any of the filters can be tweaked using the menu on the left hand side, including the weight attributed to any of the criteria (safety, service, sustainability, etc).

Troop is still in beta. We have access to a test environment, populated with latest available real data (for each destination presented you can see source and timestamp).
Data is based on restrictions in effect at the time of search - unfortunately it is not able to predict the future yet. It also only takes into account travel to destination (not the restrictions you’d have to deal with upon returning).

Troop is not a booking platform (yet), so the data shown is just for information and decision making. It does seem to save a lot of time compared with manual searches - so if you’re trying to meet with coworkers, please give it a try.

Let me or @Terry know if you have any suggestions, come across any bugs or potential improvements we can feed back to their team.

Happy planning!

[d0v4hk11n.eth]

I love the idea, and it works very conveniently. Of course, it is still in beta, but I haven’t seen any bug or problem.

I’ll look at it deeply in the following days, and if I see any problem, I’ll let you know. Thanks for sharing!

[csaba]

I really like the idea and the interface is already nice and clean. Nice find Stef, thanks for sharing!
Some small suggestions to the Troop team, if you can relay it:

• nationality is a single-choice at the moment. I would allow multiple choice there, as it can largely change travel restrictions.

• besides the 4 S-es, I think I would like to see a P as for Popularity in the selection criteria. Sometimes you would like to go to popular places, and sometimes you would like to avoid them. It would be a nice control.

• instead of tuning the weights of the 4 S-es, one could think of a number of suggestions similar to what is used in route selection (fastest, simplest, cheapest, most scenic drive, etc.)

• the trigger to start giving suggestions is currently adding at least one destination. I find this not to be too intuitive, in fact I had to watch the video to confirm it started working because of that. All the rest was very straightforward.

• finally, although I don’t think this is for a first release, I would mention that some people are not staying in one of the big hubs and thus fly from 4-5 airports, depending on destination. This is not handled at the moment, but it is also awfully complex to handle.

[Stef]

Thank you Csaba!! This is excellent feedback

[Stef]

They replied back with the following

• nationalites: noted!

• For the moment, we provide the city rank for each destination which gives you a better understanding of the popularity of a place. See the screenshot below.

instead of tuning the weights of the 4 S-es, one could think of a number of suggestions similar to what is used in route selection (fastest, simplest, cheapest, most scenic drive, etc.).

Great suggestions. We took note of it.

the trigger to start giving suggestions is currently adding at least one destination. I find this not to be too intuitive, in fact, I had to watch the video to confirm it started working because of that. All the rest was very straightforward.

We agree that it should be mentioned somewhere to avoid confusion. We took note of it and will fix that.

finally, although I don’t think this is for a first release, I would mention that some people are not staying in one of the big hubs and thus fly from 4-5 airports, depending on destination. This is not handled at the moment, but it is also awfully complex to handle.

Right now, we are planning on improving the origin functionality, so users can add an origin city without airport(s) and have flight options departing from different airports/cities. Your suggestion has been recorded. Thanks!

[Carly]

Hey there. Not sure this app works right. I tested a European trip, and it gave some very odd recommendations including China, Dubai, Quatar, and Turkey - even though all CCs were located in the EU + UK. Further, not sure the purpose is useful without budgeting and planning functions (maybe I missed those?) because I’m going to proactively look up corona restrictions myself every time without relying on an app.

[Terry]

Hey @Carly - sorry to hear you didn’t get a useful suggestion for a team meet up. If you have any screenshots to share with us that would be useful so we can ask the Troop team to investigate. Troop is still in beta version so we may experience bugs from time to time but on the whole, we have found it pretty useful when we have played around with it!

Troop can be used to support your team event and help with budgeting by estimating transport and accommodation costs. It also gives you up-to-date (at point of search) travel restrictions. You can play around with the filters on the left-hand side and adjust the attributes to suit your needs.

The results can then be used to make informed decisions on what options you have. Hopefully, it cuts down on the number of hours spent on searching each countries Covid restrictions!