Hey fellow travelers! I always found trip planning frustrating—searching for flights, comparing hotels, and creating itineraries across multiple apps. So, I started working on app, a platform that simplifies travel planning by bringing everything into one place.
It’s still evolving, and I’d love to hear your thoughts! What’s your biggest pain point when planning a trip? Would a tool like this help you?
I find trip planning fun so probably not.
I don't try to get the most possible information I can about any specific point. I don't try to get hotels by looking up all the possibilities. I mostly use booking.com or looking for places where I get points. I restrict looking at flights to those leaving from my local airport.
If someplace is a place where there is a lot of information, I skim the possibilities. I don't try to fill all my days in with activities and that helps to reduce the stress.
I think it also helps that I make decisions quickly and don't worry about it after I've decided. Sometimes I pick wrong, but that happens. It's not life or death
Hi.
For some travelers - when and how long - may depend on your employment. If working, you may be stuck with vacation schedules.
Budget is something to think about. How much can you afford for your trip will determine if you are flying coach or first class. Even how far you can go sometimes. A 12 hour round trip flight to Asia or choose a destination closer to your home country.
Your budget will determine what price range you have for accommodation. Staying in an expensive "all inclusive" luxury hotel or a cheaper budget hotel and eating at food courts, maybe from street vendors or cheaper restaurants. Same for drinking alcohol, a ritzy-posh nightclub vs a pub or simple beer bar.
Traveling alone or with a big family group affects your holiday cost. For some countries there is "high season and a low season" pricing. Usually depending on weather at the overseas locations. This may affect cost of flights as well as cost of hotels. Read up on local currency and how best to get from airport to hotel.
My opinion, get the basics down. Got a passport yet? Have back up credit and debit cards. If you lose or damage a single card and you could be in deep doodoo! If you usually drink a lot of alcohol at one sitting you could have some problems. Even be too drunk to defend yourself if a robbery attempt. Not to mention walking into traffic or not having enough sense to keep your mouth shut in some situations.
If going to a foreign country, I find it helpful to learn how to say hello and thank you in the local language.
Clothing will depend on where you are going. Cold weather sports, beach activity, treks and hikes, etc. I sometimes leave my own country in very cold weather but my final destination is hot. I dress sort of in layers, thinner jacket, perhaps sweater and long sleeve shirt. I have included gloves when arriving home late at night and have to walk from train station to my house.
Google type searches can be helpful and free too!
Up to you!
We get someone making yet another app here every other month. None of them are ever heard from again.
But you know what, I'll bite, since you're all about bringing everything together.
First, if it's an app, I won't use it. Hell, I won't even know it exists. Make it a website. Big screens make it so much easier to parse so much more information. Prove your usefulness first, and then we'll talk about apps and if there's actually any added benefit to them.
Next, what I want is hard. If it was easy, it'd exist already.
I don't care about location- or time-constrained searching, at least not at first. It all varies based on the type of trip I'm going for, of course, but these days what I mostly want to find is "a" form of accommodation (hotel | apartment/vacation home) in price range x-y with [features] such as (breakfast + restaurant on-site / restaurant in walking distance | supermarket in walking distance), in "a" pretty region (old-growth forest + hills / ...) with enough "pretty" hiking trails (meandering, so not just logging roads) starting within walking distance (ideally within 100 meters of the accommodation), to keep me happily hiking for a week, within ([short distance] of city with train connection taking x hours to me, needing a maximum of y changes) and (optionally) at least x days of continuous availability within time period y-z.
I have my go-to regions in Germany (Odenwald, Sächsische Schweiz, etc) where I can judge pretty swiftly just from a map if any type of accommodation fits, so it becomes a matter of perusing the accommodation pages until I find something with personality (though I'll settle for anonymous without obvious negative points) but right now I'm trying to gain the same familiarity with Luxembourg and around, and it's taking forever to gain that same in-depth knowledge. If I could trust any external source to at least get me part of the way there, I'd be using it in a heartbeat - but they're all about exposing the many hotels in big cities, rather than surfacing the one-off places on the edges of particular niches. Or nature.house gets me interesting vacation rentals in hopeful areas, but no searching for supermarkets / hiking trails, let alone hotels in the same regions. And Komodo e.a. help a lot with at least surfacing areas with good hiking, but then mapping that to accommodation is a needlessly manual effort, and once I've exhausted a five-town radius, I have to start from scratch again for the next potentially interesting area.
And honestly, I don't care about Luxembourg in particular - I just want a new region to explore - there must be hundreds of foresty areas in Germany alone which'd fit, plus a similar amount in Belgium, France, maybe parts of Denmark or possibly the UK?
Now, obviously, this is my niche. Everyone else will have different niches. But the type of underlying desires, requiring in-depth local knowledge and mapping various resources to that - that's pretty universal, and whoever can crack that will have a winner. And maybe it's worth picking just a single such niche and solving that first, as a proof of concept?
[ Edit: Edited on 7 Mar 2025, 08:22 GMT by Sander ]
For me planning a trip is one of the best part of my holiday. For me it is fun, looking for a good and interesting route for our road-trip, searching for nice places for overnight staying, looking what an city have to offer, a.s.o. Without this work it would feel for me like a commoditized product, nothing special.
I love trip planning.
And the only big(-ish) thing I find frustrating is about accommodation. I have honed my specifications during the years. One of the must item is of course the location, I want it to be near public transportation and also near grocery store. Both or atleast bus and/or metrostops are often mentioned in booking.com, hotels.com etc. But what you can't find there is stores. I mostly do my own cooking and I don't enjoy hauling bags full of groceries for miles and miles. Now I am stuck running the google maps on the backround while finding a accommodation.
Also annoying is that the sites I do look the accommodation doesn't have auto-safe on my preferences. I need to click the filters there again everytime I do the search.
So those are my two things I would love to get improved 
And I absolutely agree with Sander that website would be much better platform than an app. I only use my phone with bookings and plannings if I absolutely have to! I appreciate the bigger screen and I just bought a new laptop 
I also prefer using a computer with a big screen for research. Easier for me to save stuff, search something and access my saved data.
On trips I do leave my big screen computer at home. When out of town I take my 10 inch netbook with me. About the same info on the netbook but smaller keyboard. Fits in my carry-on bag. Works with free wifi overseas. Fits in a hotel safe.
Relatives chipped in to buy me a smart phone to replace my smaller Nokia sized cell phone. (Wanted me in the 21st century I guess.) I mostly use it for accessing out of area radio stations when driving. I do like the built in camera. (Smart Phone does't fit any of the smaller tailored pockets on all of my trousers so it is usually left in my car.) 
Not interested in becoming a Smartphone Zombie! Walking into telephone poles, falling in holes, getting hit by busses, etc. 
For me, a website would be something I might glance at from time to time.
For those of us of (ahem) a certain age, planning on paper with just a guidebook - no internet or apps - was the only method we had short of hiring an agent or taking an escorted tour. Imagine not being able to see lots of candid pictures or reviews of accommodations, restaurants, attractions, etc. or up-to-date transport schedules, museum hours and entry fees, etc?
Somehow we all survived, and had a pretty good time too. :O)
I still use paper maps for their broader coverage, and to keep the phone tucked away.
Quoting goodfish
For those of us of (ahem) a certain age, planning on paper with just a guidebook - no internet or apps - was the only method we had short of hiring an agent or taking an escorted tour. Imagine not being able to see lots of candid pictures or reviews of accommodations, restaurants, attractions, etc. or up-to-date transport schedules, museum hours and entry fees, etc?
Somehow we all survived, and had a pretty good time too. :O)
I still use paper maps for their broader coverage, and to keep the phone tucked away.
I used to get books out of the library and write up summaries of what they said for my parents when they traveled or for my husband who was in the Navy- telling him what to do in ports he visited. I had a little PanAmerican guide book (hard cover) and I would underline in it things I might be interested in him buying for me. My parents would get road maps from the gas companies with routes marked on them. And I was using the AAA triptiks and guidebooks well into this century
[ Edit: Edited on 9 Mar 2025, 14:45 GMT by greatgrandmaR ]