User experience seem to be the hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. There’s always talk about it being the number one thing a company needs to focus on. Without it, it doesn’t matter how many boxes your product checks off, it won’t be usable. I’m going out on a limb and say that the experience should not be just in the product itself. It’s well before that. It’s at the first interaction your customer/user has with your company. The first touch.
With web applications, a user may start their search traditionally on a search engine. They will probably be taken to some landing page where there is some information about what they are looking for, and hopefully, a call to action. Now this is where the user has their first experience interacting with your company. This page is very important. It must answer three basic questions:
What does your company do?
Why do I need it?
What is the next step?
If these three questions can be easily answered on the page they are viewing, they might be more likely to convert. Miss just one, and they’re leaving.
Another way to explain it when you’re out looking for an Italian restaurant with friends. You search on your phone and find Joe’s Italian Restaurant. It’s probably pretty clear that they serve Italian based on the name. Check. Looks like they are a traditional Tuscany style restaurant. Luckily, you are craving a Florentine steak. Check. Bonus points, they take reservations. There’s your call to action to call them up or book a table online. The story will be no different even if you stumbled on the restaurant walking around neighborhood. The experience begins the moment you spot it, and step inside to and ask for a table and doesn’t end until the check arrives.
My wife and I always wanted to be able to take a trip around the world, non stop. Basically leave our home in the Bay Area and disappear for about a year. Sure, we’ve traveled quite a bit together, but there are just so many places that we still have yet to discover. Me, being a big Formula One fan, thought it would be an incredible experience to travel the world via the Formula One race schedule. Actually answering this question for myself came from an inspiration from a question posted on Quora, that I was asked to answer.
So, what would it take? How long will we be gone? How many flights do we need to purchase? Do we have enough time to visit all the tourist spots and still have time to watch the race? There are breaks in between race weekends, sometimes just 4 days, sometimes 4 weeks. There will be back and forth flying between continents. You will have to return to the states at one point, the depart again. I’m going to make a lot of assumptions as to make the calculations easier.
Formula One travel flight path.
(horrendous screen shot above)
The F1 race schedule for 2012 consists of 20 races, starting from Melbourne, Australia and ending in São Paulo, Brazil. The total miles traveled will be approximately 100,000 miles. Yes, you can probably get some frequent flyer mileage out of this and pick up a few free flights here and there, but we’ll leave those out. You’ll need hotel stay for each location you are at. You’ll need a budget for food for each location. You’ll need transportation to and from the track, and in/around town. There are 254 days starting from the start of the season on March 16th, 2012, through November 25th. We’ll use this number for daily rates.
Accommodations: Let’s account for expensive locations (Melbourne, Bahrain, Japan, Montreal, etc..), and less expensive locations (Kuala Lumpur, New Dehli, Austin, Brazil), and average out each night’s stay to be approximately $150. This is assuming you don’t stay in $12 hostels since F1 is a luxury event! 254 days x $150 = $38,000. Yikes! This is already a lot of money.
Food: You’ll need this to survive. I don’t think the typical work paid per diem of $40/day will work here. It might in some locations, but may not in others. Let’s up that to $50 to be safe so you won’t need to eat at Mc Donald’s every meal. We’ll eat the free continental breakfast at the hotel to save a few bucks and allow for a couple of nice restaurants. 254 days x $50 = $12,700.
Flights: One would think to assume that this is the most expensive item for your trip. We will fly coach the entire way, and will pick the cheapest flight. To make life easier, I’m going to use Expedia and plan one-way flights starting from our point of origin of San Francisco. Here it goes:
Origin
Destination
Price
San Francisco, CA
Melbourne, Australia
$997.00
Melbourne, Australia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
$553.00
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Shanghai, China
$311.00
Shanghai, China
Bahrain
$884.00
Bahrain
Catalunya, Spain
$604.00
Catalunya, Spain
Monaco
$212.00
Monaco
Montreal, Canada
$1,765.00
Montreal, Canada
Valencia, Spain
$1,781.00
Valencia, Spain
Silverstone, England
$884.00
Silverstone, England
Hockenheim, Germany
$290.00
Hockenheim, Germany
Budapest, Hungary
$245.00
Budapest, Hungary
Spa, Belgium
$320.00
Spa, Belgium
Monza, Italy
$424.00
Monza, Italy
Singapore
$560.00
Singapore
Suzuka, Japan
$498.00
Suzuka, Japan
Seoul, S. Korea
$390.00
Seoul, S. Korea
New Delhi, India
$624.00
New Delhi, India
Austin, TX
$1,038.00
Austin, TX
Sao Paulo, Brazil
$1,006.00
Sao Paulo, Brazil
San Francisco, CA
$1,485.00
Total flights:
$14,871.00
Ah ha! Thought wrong. It’s almost the cheapest item. Might be even cheaper if you go through a booking agent to get a ‘package deal’ .
In town transportation: I’m going to make this easy. $20 day? At 254 days, that’s $5,080.
F1 ticket prices: Don’t forget you need to pay for this too. There isn’t a ‘season’ pass for Formula One. We’ll assume you want a grandstand seat. Most grandstand seats start in the low $100’s, and can be as high as $800! Let’s take an average of $350 assuming there are tracks that you wouldn’t need a grandstand to have a great view of the race such as Australia, Monza, and Monaco (since you have a friend that has a condo located there, right?) At 20 races, $350 x 20 = $7,000.
So, there you have it. Adding all this up results in over $77,000 USD as your final cost. Whew. Double occupancy should save you $17,000 since you would not want to travel alone. It’s huge money for the 99%. There are incredible destinations that you will cover and it would be an experience of a life time. Anyone want to sponsor me ?
We’ll cover what attractions at other locations some other day.
