Success Story
About the Client
101 Islands is a digital travel experience platform that brings destinations to life through curated itineraries, handpicked tours, and products. Powered by Grotu’s patented group travel and event-planning technology, the platform simplifies discovery, coordination, and booking in one seamless marketplace, helping travelers save time, reduce costs, and turn complex journeys into effortlessly planned experiences.
Business Situation and Requirements
Group travel and event planning is highly fragmented and inefficient, relying on scattered WhatsApp threads, spreadsheets, emails, and manual coordination. Decisions around destinations, dates, activities, and budgets are time-consuming, often dominated by a few voices, with no structured way to capture group preferences, track shared expenses, or centralize photos and videos.
To overcome the fragmented and manual nature of group travel and event planning, 101 Islands set out to reimagine the entire experience through a unified, mobile-first platform. The goal was to replace scattered conversations, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools with a single application where users could collaboratively plan, decide, and manage every aspect of their trips in one place. Backed by a patented trip-planning framework that enabled group surveys, transparent expense tracking, and shared photo management, the client sought to bring this vision to life as a scalable, market-ready mobile app.
Beyond development, 101 Islands required a strategic technology partner who could help shape the product from the ground up—contributing to experience design, feature ideation, and architectural decisions. Unthinkable was selected for its deep expertise in mobile application engineering and its innovation-led, product-thinking approach.
The key requirements were:
Architect a scalable, future-ready system capable of supporting rapid growth and seamless onboarding of new travel partners and businesses.
Design an intuitive, visually engaging UI/UX that delivers a frictionless and delightful experience for travelers and organizers alike.
Build a comprehensive mobile platform that enables users to plan and manage not just trips, but also group events and related activities in a single, unified experience.
Develop a robust core engine to power collaborative event planning, shared photo management, and transparent expense reporting for each trip or event.
The Solution
Our team began the project with in-depth, face-to-face sessions to finalize workflows and gain a comprehensive understanding of the application requirements. Leveraging our expertise in custom application development, we identified the most effective approach to meet both business objectives and user needs.
Following this, we focused on designing an intuitive UI/UX tailored for travelers, emphasizing smooth booking experiences, virtual guides, and curated tours. To bring the concept to life, the team developed a functional app prototype, allowing stakeholders to visualize the user journey and validate design decisions early in the process. This structured approach ensured alignment, reduced development risks, and set the foundation for a seamless, user-friendly travel application.
Cross-Platform Mobile Development
To accelerate time-to-market, the app was built with React Native for the front end, delivering native-like performance and reusable code across platforms. The back end leveraged Drupal for scalability and a rich module ecosystem, ensuring a robust, feature-rich application for travel and event planning.
Comprehensive Travel & Event Planning Tools
The app provides a full suite of features for group coordination, including:
- Creating new trips and surveys, organizing potlucks, parties, and events.
- Managing and sharing group photos.
- Creating and viewing expense reports.
These integrated tools streamline planning and enhance the overall user experience.
Scalable Image Storage & Optimization
High-definition photos are continuously uploaded and shared, requiring scalable server storage. Images are hosted on AWS S3, enabling virtually unlimited storage, global content delivery, optimized loading times, enhanced security, and reduced server costs.
Monetization via Google AdMob
The app integrates Google AdMob, generating revenue through in-app purchases and mobile advertising. This allows targeted ads and promotions without disrupting the user experience, providing a seamless and effective monetization strategy for the platform.
The Impact
Team Unthinkable delivered a cross-platform mobile app that helped 101 Islands launch successfully, earning praise from the travel community for its intuitive trip planning, expense management, and memory-sharing features.
The platform now supports over 200 travel businesses and 10,000 users, and its innovative approach has been recognized with a US patent, establishing it as a cutting-edge advancement in travel technology.
