Lucal is a mobile platform that lets you explore the world one street, beach or city at a time through local visual media, such as mobile live streams, drone and short videos, timelapses, photos and VR (360° photos and videos). With these geotagged and displayed on a feed alongside an interactive map, you can feel the vibe and lifestyle of the location as it really is from multiple angles on any device. Whether you’re just exploring the world, planning a new journey, finding inspiration or looking to book accommodation in a particular area, it’s the closest thing to actually being there in person.
We focus on locally sourced, user-generated visual content to show each place as seen through the eyes of its locals. It’s constantly reviewed and rated by our community to keep it relevant and up-to-date.
You’ll find alternative, boutique and eco-friendly accommodation options displayed within the feed and map, allowing you to make bookings based on the area and surroundings, not just the property itself. We source these from various affiliate partner sites, based on quality (e.g. high user rating), authenticity and location.
A lot of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-track locations on earth are also ones facing most socio-economic problems. By enabling the discovery of these destinations, we aim to help spread the travel/tourism concentrations away from main conventional travel hotspots. This will help raise awareness, interest and drive local economies (give jobs etc). We plan to use a portion of the profits derived from each destination to help local communities and relevant issues e.g. cleaning the beaches, etc.
By adding the visual aspect to predominantly text-based information, we help you make better informed decisions and provide a personalised, end-to-end experience when exploring, planning or booking accommodation.
Rough demo at https://lucal.co/explore/Rio-De-Janeiro--Brazil (not yet optimised for mobile, please view on your laptop/desktop)
My biggest concern is about how many pieces need to hit "critical mass" to be successful. You need digital content to attract users, but your model relies on users to provide the digital content.
For example, to cover a new/off-the-path location, you'll need to seed your platform with media. How much media can you scrape from publicly available locations to do this? What incentives would locals have to generate content for the platform for expanding to a new location? Would you pay freelancers or hope for people to upload content for free?
Really cool idea though and something that I could totally see using to plan my next trip!