If you’ve ever had a layover in Paris on a Tuesday and tried to go to the Louvre to capitalize on the time spent waiting around for your connecting flight, there’s a decent chance you learned the hard way that — obviously — the Louvre isn’t open on Tuesdays, and your trip to see the Mona Lisa would have to wait until the next time you happen to have 5 hours to kill in the French capital.
Triplan, a Israeli travel planning platform launched last month, aims to eliminate this problem by offering users tailor-made trip itineraries generated within seconds and requiring no prior knowledge of a city, its operations and the midweek days which it has decided are unsuitable for showing off fine art.
While the idea of a pre-made itinerary is nothing new, the folks at Triplan are confident that they present value to travelers by allowing them to set the precise parameters of their trip to a given city, using pattern recognition, big data, tourist behavior analysis and machine learning to generate an ideal plan for their stay, including hotel bookings, travel accommodations and attraction bookings.
Since its launch, Triplan has helped 15,000 users, saving them from dreaded travel Plan Bs, such as a sleepy boat tour to see the charred remains of the Notre Dame Cathedral rather than the dismembered elegance of the Venus de Milo.
"We are happy to offer the Israeli public, known for its love of traveling abroad, a free, simple and convenient tool that will save the tedious trip planning process,” said Triplan co-CEO and former tour guide Omer Egozi. “After years of helping thousands of travelers experience the destinations abroad in the best possible way as tour guides, we felt that we had the knowledge of how to build the ultimate model that would be an ideal solution for every Triplan user."
Co-CEO Avi Bosmat noted the value that Triplan brings to the Israeli populace, which has a reputation for its propensity to travel. "The Israeli consumer has always known how to adopt new technologies that help him in a variety of fields and for extensive uses. Even in the field of Travel-Tech, which is growing at a fast pace, our main goal is to offer technological and experiential solutions for the comfort of travelers,” he said. “Triplan, as a smart platform, will continue to learn the changing needs of travelers.”
Inbound tourism is doing big numbers
While outbound tourism from Israel is surely doing well, the amount of incoming tourists last month has neared record-breaking levels. The month of January saw 257,400 tourist entries recorded, representing a 457% increase on January 2022, when tourist flights were still closed down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month’s numbers were only 9.6% shy of the record-setting January 2019, when 284,800 tourists made their way into the country.
It’s likely that Israel’s tourism industry will continue to recover from the pandemic’s aftermath, especially considering that 2020-21 set such a low bar: last year an impressive 2.675 million tourist entries were recorded, as opposed to only 397,000 in 2021 and 831,000 in 2020.