Jon StojanWhen embarking on your next big adventure, it’s natural to feel excitement and uncertainty. However, organizing yourself and the rest of your group during the trip can prove to be an unwanted headache many wish to avoid. That’s why Founder Robin Fish created the AI travel app Arrive. This is her story:
Image Credit: Robin Fish
Think back to your last big vacation. What feelings did you experience moments before leaving home?
Was it excitement? Anticipation?
Maybe even a bit of bliss at the notion of finally taking that trip you’ve worked so hard for and that you rightly deserve?
In the United States, roughly 40% of Americans travel or take a vacation on-average 1 to 3 times per year, signaling that vacation travel is still a big investment for many of us. Those moments when you’re gearing up for a trip should be easy and painless. What it shouldn’t be is stressful.
Yet 90% of Americans find travel stressful and 70% agree that actually planning the trip is the stressful part.
When Manhattan based entrepreneur and founder Robin Fish was tasked with planning her family’s ‘perfect’ trip to Costa Rica, she experienced the pain most Americans feel first hand when pre-planning, such as coordinating multiple flights, hotels, transportation, and activities. “In 2022, I meticulously planned our family trip to Costa Rica,” she explains. “After doing so, I wanted to present my family with a visually-beautiful itinerary matching the level of care I put into planning it. This way, they could be confident that everything was handled, and could focus their attention on getting excited, and I wouldn’t have to be the bottleneck for information while traveling.”
Fish scoured the web for an intuitive, seamless solution that could reflect what she had in mind, but what she found simply didn’t do the trip she planned justice, as well as being time-consuming to input all the travel info, and in the end-it wasn’t pretty.
That’s when the idea for ‘ARRIVE’ was born.
“I had an idea to create a tool that could organize all the details related to a user’s travel plans, such as flight bookings, hotel reservations, and activities – but make it beautiful as well,” shares Fish. “This tool would make it easy for travelers to quickly access their itinerary information when their hands were full in a strange new city while also allowing them to share it with others if traveling as part of a group – or even just to keep their loved ones back home informed.”
But most of all, it would allow travelers to minimize their time on a device so they could focus more of their energy exploring with loved ones.
“We’ve all had those moments when you’re watching your loved one, and they’re stuck on their phone trying to find a decent restaurant to eat at or directions to the next item on your schedule. I wanted to change that,” explains Fish.
Image Credit: Robin Fish
With an extensive background in technology, but not an engineer, the AI travel app ‘ARRIVE’ soon bloomed in July of 2023.
“I think it’s exciting that you can put together a working proof of concept and not be an engineer nowadays. It opens up the possibility for a more diverse set of solutions to be built.”
From the get-go, ‘ARRIVE’ was a travel app designed to enhance the user’s experience with its beautiful, eye-catching graphics, neon tones and playful animations, creating a sense of fun and anticipation for the trip ahead.
This experience hopes to encourage travelers to feel prepared, knowing their information is safe and accessible in a foreign city. ‘ARRIVE’ does this by having a fun and easy interface to organize your travel information, automatically adding essential details to your itinerary, and making it easy to store and share all the information you need in one place.
While acting like a reliable traveling assistant, its other user-friendly functions are programmed to behave similarly to an instant messaging service. You can ask it a question about your itinerary and quickly get a response, so you won’t have to rummage through your emails. “It’s as natural as texting a friend,” says Fish.
“It was so exciting the first time I used the WhatsApp ‘ARRIVE’ assistant. I was staying at an Airbnb in Paris, and being Paris I needed two door codes to get into the apartment. When I met the host he gave them to me in person. I entered them into the Airbnb info in ‘ARRIVE.’ When I came back later that day I asked the assistant, “What are the door codes to my AirBNB?” The assistant immediately replied back not just with the door codes, but also with the address that was linked to Google Maps for easy directions. It was sooooo awesome because it was so easy and I could seamlessly verify I was at the right address and get off the street instead of being so obviously a tourist trying to get into this building digging through my phone for the codes.”
This application is an excellent tool for working collaboratively with others and offers a unique and flexible approach to accommodate those who prefer to break away from traditional dated methods.
With a long-term goal of building a customized recommendation engine to reduce customer’s screen time, ‘ARRIVE’ hopes to present options that meet the discerning yet playful tastes of many frequent travelers. Whether it’s about finding culinary hot spots or a list of to-dos, the stress-reducing app ‘ARRIVE’ caters to those who crave elevated and uniquely local experiences.
As a passionate advocate of self-discovery and exploration who has journeyed across 28 countries and counting, Fish has gained invaluable experience in navigating the obstacles of traveling. This is especially true when addressing women’s safety concerns in unfamiliar environments. “I felt more at ease knowing my parents knew exactly where I was and how to reach me in case of emergency,” related Emily, one of ‘ARRIVE’S’ users.
For more information on how to get your hands on ‘ARRIVE,’ download the free app here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arrive-travel/id6477830557.