Our Insights Post 5 mins Dave Thorpe When your travel app misleads, it’s not just inconvenient The pressure’s on to get it right If your travel app gives someone the wrong information – a late arrival, a missed connection, a broken journey – it doesn’t just frustrate them. It knocks confidence in your brand. And it only takes one bad experience for that user to start looking elsewhere. Customers build their plans around the information your app gives them. When that information is wrong, they stop trusting it. And when they stop trusting it, they stop using it. Things start to break when you can’t see what’s happening on the move One of the biggest risks for travel apps is a lack of visibility once journeys are in motion. Delays, diversions, congestion. If your app isn’t connected to what’s happening out there, it quickly becomes unreliable. You might be relying on basic location feeds or static schedules that don’t flex when things change. And if your team can’t track or respond to what’s actually happening, that disconnect starts to show. The result? More support tickets. Lower ratings. Complaints from users who “were told the bus was on time” but ended up stranded. The goal is simple: make your travel app trustworthy again People don’t expect perfection. But they do expect accuracy. They want to know where their service is, how long it will take, and what’s changed. When travel apps deliver this consistently, they don’t just work better. They become a reliable part of someone’s day. And that’s what drives repeat use, higher engagement and long-term loyalty. “We’re already using location data - isn’t that enough?” It’s a fair question. And for a while, it might have been enough. But expectations have changed. Live movement, delay updates, clearer routing. These are now the minimum. The ideal solution? Integrating telematics. You might already be thinking, “We don’t have the infrastructure for that,” or, “It’ll be expensive to build.” But integrating telematics doesn’t mean a total rebuild. It’s about connecting to better-quality data and making that useful inside your app. How telematics helps (and how to get started) Telematics gives your app a clearer view of what’s happening on the road. Not the schedule, the reality. Telematics is, put simply, the use of telecoms and monitoring systems to gather live data from moving vehicles. This includes location, speed, fuel use, driver behaviour and more. In a travel app, this helps you: Provide realistic arrival times based on traffic and movement Reroute or alert users when delays occur Avoid overpromising and underdelivering Integrating telematics brings your app closer to what users actually experience, and lets them rely on what it tells them. To integrate it well: Work with a reliable data provider who specialises in transport and location Design with simplicity in mind so users get what they need quickly Monitor how the new data affects behaviour and keep improving from there You don’t have to do it all at once. Start with the journeys or services where trust is weakest, and build from there. If your app’s struggling to keep up, what’s holding you back? You don’t need to wait for another complaint or another dropped star in the app store. Let’s look at how to reconnect your app with what’s actually happening – and what your users expect from you. arran@indiespring.com
