I haven’t posted any travel related ideas since the excess baggage allowance exchange idea I posted a while back. As I travelled recently to and from Dubai recently though, two ideas occurred to me - one on the way there and the other on the way back.

I am currently looking for a developer to work for equity on one of my projects. So it occurred to me as I flew out to Dubai that it would have been nice to have setup one or two meetings with local candidates prior to my travel. So my new idea was for a website that I could have gone to to state where I was travelling to and what kinds of people local or other visitors I was interested in meeting. The way I saw it, locals could subscribe to RSS feeds for their cities and look out for interesting visitors. I soon discarded this idea though because the potential for abuse could exceed its usefulness very quickly. I can think of many seedier uses that such a site could be put to.

OK so on the return leg of the journey I had another idea. I noticed that another passenger a few seats away from me was reading some exam guides for medical surgery and clinical something or other. No points to me for guessing he was a medical student. I looked around and wondered what other passengers did for a living. One guy looked to me like an accountant, another a lawyer. Of course I was probably totally wrong with my guesses.

Anyway, I then thought wouldn’t it be nice to be able to visit a site prior to travelling, state my flight details and see if anyone who else was will be on the same flight - all anonymously of course, with perhaps just a username to identify each user by. I could then look at my fellow passengers’ profiles - what they do, why they are visiting etc. If I was so inclined I could also make contact with any interesting passengers that had expressed an interest in meeting other people. Or if I just wanted to nose around without actually meeting anyone, it would at the very least make my guessing game above a lot more interesting.

Essentially, I am talking about a social network for travellers centered around their flights. Of course and perhaps more usefully, the site would also allow me to see previous and frequent travellers to my destination and to contact them for recommendations as to where to go etc. Whether this can stand alone as a product or is better as a feature of an existing travel site such as the excellent TripIt.com is another matter, but it is a feature/product that I would certainly use.