Hitlist Travel App Embraces Spontaneity

Gillian Morris could not convince friends to come visit her while living in Istanbul.

Despite initial enthusiasm for a couch to crash on in Turkey’s capital city, friends just wouldn’t take the initiative to actually book a trip. So Morris started giving them specific dates and flight suggestions, hoping to make the decision to visit an easier one. The result? A well worn couch and a rotating cast of traveling friends.

This is how Morris conceived the idea for Hitlist — an app that offers suggestions for destinations, then emails you specific dates when good deals arise. The app presents you with a pretty picture of a new place, asks you if you’ve been there and whether or not you’d like to go.  It then uses your answers to determine which destinations to suggest next, while allowing for plenty of spontaneity as well. The platform also pulls from your Facebook friends information to display the people you know in each destination.

“If people knew more about the world, they’d feel a lot more comfortable going to these places,” said Morris, explaining the motivation behind the Facebook friends display.

As an adventurous traveler herself, the founder and CEO hopes that the appealing display, tempting prices, and the personal connection of seeing, “hey, I actually know someone there” will make travel less intimidating and encourage people to see more places.

It was probably Morris’ spontaneous spirit that gave her the courage the launch Hitlist, six months ago. The team has since grown to four, with around 32,000 users so far.

The biggest challenge for the Hitlist team has been identifying how to properly communicate their story, and finding the right people to tell it to. Morris has quite a few stories up her sleeve herself, from a deportation in Kazakhstan, to a spur of the moment flight to the Turkish coast.

Morris recalls using sites like Kayak and Skyscanner for her own travels, and although she finds them useful, she also dreads the twenty windows that must be opened if your options are flexible. Hitlist offers a more inspired approach to experiencing the world, and Morris hopes that users will embrace that.

In a landscape of so many startups trying to make the world more organized, Hitlist embraces the unknown — encouraging users to book a flight on a whim.

Eventually, they hope to enable users to book flights through the app, and there are plenty of customization options in the works. But embracing spontaneity and the ability to make the world a smaller, more accessible place will remain at the core of this startup’s story.

“Everything is a challenge in a startup,” she told me with a lighthearted laugh. But so far, Hitlist seems to be overcoming those challenges. They recently won the top prize at an AlleyNYC Startup Battle, valued at $25,000, including legal help, coworking space, and cash.

I tried the app myself and was presented with San Diego and five friends that live there. Looks like I could probably find a couch to sleep on myself — and a cheap ticket to get there. It’s a temptation that I’m sure will inspire plenty of spontaneity.