I would definitely recommend adding example images directly to the main page, along with the link to the example trip. Otherwise there's nothing really to draw users in to using if they have to go searching for how the experience looks like.
Thanks for your suggestion! I was hesitant at first cause it was under heavy development so anything I put there on main page might get outdated very soon. I'll add them very soon~
also just because your landing page now has an example featuring singapore - this is my guide to singapore http://swyx.io/sg-guide and i feel like encouraging people to make opinionated guides to where they live is kinda nice and under explored
This is amazing. I've used wanderlog extensively, but while its feature set is great, it can be a nightmare to work due to how slow it can be sometimes.
I've just registered to test it out a little bit. I tried to replicate my upcoming trip that I have set up in Wanderlog, and have the following feedback:
- Overall, amazing! Snappy. Real easy to follow.
- I love the simplicity.
- I like that this is essentially excel (kind of), but with travel specific additions.
Now for the potential improvements:
- I can't add someone else as an editor, it seems. Clicking add just logs a "TripForm" with the form object. I don't see any network requests either.
- Expenses don't allow me to select how to split it (maybe this is an issue because there's no-one else part of the trip?)
- Timetable contrast needs a bit of work. Maybe needs some padding/margins or something.
- MapTiler doesn't seem to have a good enough database. I struggled to add 152 Morrison Road
- Activities can't span multiple days (I tried adding a train ride than arrived 45 mins past midnight)
- Adding/editing activities while on the timetable page, does not update them until I refresh (or navigate away)
Outside of all that, how are you planning to monetise this? The code is released under MIT, which doesn't stop anyone from adding some subscription plan, hosting it, and advertising it. May I suggest something like AGPL?
Thank you for trying them and providing such a detailed feedback!
- On Trip Sharing, hmm that seems weird. While I understand that there's no 'loading' indicator yet, one should be able to do so if one is the 'owner' of the trip
- Expense split: because that feature isn't there yet
- Thanks I'll consider it
- The map I chose on MapTiler is OpenStreetMap, but I limit it to Point-of-interest only, maybe I need to expand it to match more kind of objects
- Aha, for that case, I find that it's so troublesome that I have to split the activity into two different elements for display in the timetable, so I disabled the case for now. Thanks for a great use case!
- Hmm strange, the activites should reflect live. Maybe the 'back-end' is a bit slow
Anyway, the 'back-end' is InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com ) and it's opening a WebSocket connection, that's why you don't see network calls when doing operations
P.S. I don't think I'll monetise this ever. If someone forks it and monetise it, as long as it doesn't affect me, I think I'm fine with it. If I run out of my 'free usage' quota, I'll probably limit the users to only handful of people
The AGPL won't prevent anyone from adding some subscription plan, hosting it, and advertising it. It does require them to license derivative works under the AGPL.
There are many different goals for developing software, and different ways to make money doing it. The AGPL can be useful for some of them, but can be rather limiting too.
Hey figmert -- this is Peter, one of the co-founders of Wanderlog. I'm actually on a trip to Italy right now and definitely feel your pain with some performance issues, and we've been working hard to improve this.
If you haven't tried the app in the last few months, can you try it again and let me know what parts are feeling slow for you by emailing me directly at peter@wanderlog.com? I'd love to take a closer look, and especially if you've got specifics with screenshots/videos, I can try to fix some of these myself too.
Interesting app. Planning, expenses, and keeping people on track during the trip are some ways I'd think about using the app. TripIt is what we use for the latter. All things get recorded there starting with flights that bookend the trip. That's particularly low friction to get going. You know what you need to fill in next whether it's transport or accommodation.
Your app seems to appeal to the planner type of personality making it too high friction for me. I like to plan trips, but this approach is just way too heavyweight. If I was to suggest an approach that might augment what you have while being structured to an extent (I don't love the shared doc approach) is to allow someone to sketch an itinerary on a map. Then zoom to each general location and do searches for known things to add. Also allow the option to search for general things like restaurants in the vicinity. Bringing in this Google Maps-esque approach would help me.
I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.
My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.
My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.
I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:
1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.
2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.
3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.
I ended up winding it down and moving on.
I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.
Several things, but wide adoption is NOT one of them.
First and foremost, it's for my own personal use. I like to organize things and I find that the messy doc/spreadsheet way is way too messy for my liking, especially when I find a need to coordinate plans with other friends overseas. That's why I started this.
Secondly, it's for fun and for learning. I enjoy build websites and explore what browser can provide. I learned that browser have API for drag-and-drop element to pass data to a target element
So at the end of the day, I see it as a fun side project and nothing more.
The landing page very much looks like a serious product looking for adoption, though. It might mislead users into thinking that it is intended to be something more than a fun side project.
A friend of mine built a similar thing as a mobile app and also failed to get adoption.
I think what these tools miss is that it’s kinda fun to plan a trip and I don’t necessarily need an app to help. It seems hard and like something I’ll need to learn once, and relearn when I need it again
Also I don’t want to plan out every second of my trips. Seems like this is useful for big trips with many people who need to be herded around, but in my estimation that kind of trip usually isn’t even that fun to begin with.
I agree that anything that requires tripmates to make an account is going to be a hard sell for most groups. At least most people are already on Google Docs these days.
It's not clear to me how much of this requires an account, but I would encourage making as much as possible accessible without a login. Some people will want to help plan but there are also many people who just want to come along for the ride.
You gotta add debouncing or disable the button(s) once clicked and are pending for results; got several email codes and random errors because I clicked again thinking the button(s) didn’t work
Adding a sample trip might help a lot to give an idea of how to use it.
Inputs feel tedious and not smart enough; so much that it feels to get in the way instead of helping.
Activity date input shouldn’t be free date input; I inputted the start and end date earlier, couldn’t that be used to help limit the input range? End date/time feels tedious as well, it could be a duration input instead (eg 3h at this location).
It also lacks some extra planning features, like pooling the list of locations to visit (no dates yet), for later to be scheduled if it ends up interesting.
This is cool. Having used similar apps (e.g. wanderlog), one thing they lack that I would LOVE is timetable filtering. When I travel, I find that I'm either in logistics mode or fun mode. Here's the idea:
In logistics mode, I want a detailed, precise timetable focused on transportation and lodging. I don't even want to see my fun ideas.
In fun mode, I want a relaxed set of suggestions based on my current location, and a single timestamp telling me when I need to go back into logistics mode.
Does that make sense? Its almost like I want two travel agents: a didactic drill sargeant to get me from A to B, and a chill surfer bum that helps me go with the flow.
I used to be like this, but then my family grew to a size that we can't just go and walk in a restaurant and expect to have a table without a 60 minute wait. Traveling with a large family requires quite a bit more planning than just hopping on a random flight to a random country by yourself for two days.
I empathise with this, but I am torn in half by the opposing hatred for regretting not doing a thing or visiting a place that I can only do when on holiday.
The collaboration part is not that developed (but does exist based on Matrix as decentralized and end to end encrypted storage). That works very well is ticket extraction for hotels, train or flight + search for connection using public transport APIs.
The program isn't particularly helpful for me because my workflow doesn't map out at all. First, we collect sights that we (the group!) want to see. Then everyone prioritizes what is more and less important to them. Then we check what discounts there are on public transport and which tourist tickets are available. This creates constraints as to what we might have to do on the same day. Then we sort the sights on the map. This creates further constraints as to what we have to do on the same day. And then we try to reconcile all of these constraints and interests by spreading the sights out over the days. I have no idea how I could do that with your program.
Looks nice! Since it's MIT licensed and I'd assume free to use, I'd suggest including that in the landing page. Since the homepage didn't include the keywords "price", "pricing", "free" or "cost" (related to pricing) I unfortunately thought it'd have dark patterns where you start planning a trip and then at some point it'd ask for payment.
Really nice, but it is unclear to me how time is represented with regard to timezones.
Some large countries may have multiple time zones, and itineraries can be confusing, this needs consideration from data modeling and ux side as well. The first glance at the UI didn't make it obvious for me how this is handled, I suppose local time is used always.
Yeah this is not that obvious, but the selected 'destination time zone' is the only time zone that one will be working with when planning the activities within the trip. (When inputting/reading the activities' time zone, they are all the destination's time zone)
The only local time zone used is at the comments (but hopefully it is clearer since I show the time zone offset there? I don't show it on the events since I feel it could be way too verbose)
I understand that there could be case where one's trip crosses multiple time zones, but at this moment that wasn't supported yet.
At the very least, you have to consider time zones for travel to/from your destination, as that's quite often a different time zone for international travel. Don't want to miss your flight...
First of all, it is very interesting to see how others expect to plan their vacation.
Previously, I had made a travel app for myself, however, it was different. The main feature was around the map and locations, with a necessary list of some POIs. When I was in the city, I used it to see if there was something interesting that I had pre-scouted not far from my location.
From the technical side, I took a look into the CSS and was surprised. Some of the CSS I could not even understand (like below), and there were thousands of different colours used hundreds of times. Not sure if it was by design.
Yup, it's using CSS Grid and since I have to declare the grid templates upfront, and my granularity is at minute level, it means I have to declare each minute of the day, i.e. 24 * 60 = 1440, as the rows of the grid
Seems similar to Wanderlog but less mature. I wish you best of luck!
Whatever you do, please do not make the app as slow as Wanderlog - I literally had to create an Android app to interact with my trips because their app isn't optimized at all!
My current 'favorite idea I probably won't build' is an sms chat bot that does exactly this for guys in their 30s & 40s. The hard part is actually organizing the group of friends to pick a weekend and location. So a bot that can help with all of that first, is really compelling for me.
OP, let me know if you want to do a user group trying to help us organize a trip.
Probably you just need to copy `.env.example` into `.env` and replace the required API keys. [1] The whole 'back-end' is an external dependency hosted elsewhere by InstantDB [2] While they claim that you can self-host it too, I haven't been bothered to self-host it myself. Other than that, I'm using MapTiler Cloud for the mapping service [3] since I find that while there are free ones, those can be quite limited when doing things like geocoding (querying keyword to coordinates).
Sounds interesting, but I (and I suppose others reaching the landing page might be as well) was discouraged to check it out because it requires me to sign up to learn more.
Yeah I agree, haven't get around that part yet since the auth part is handled by 3rd party (InstantDB). However you can use throwaway email service and it accepts that too
Hi! Co-founder of Wanderlog (YC W19) here - what issues did you run into with it? I'd love to get your take to see if there's anything we can do there.
Hmmm okay so I come from Excel world and when I arrange my plans in timetable view (in Excel), I need to 'merge' several cells together. However if circumstances change and I have to rearrange those events to other days or other timings, it become a pain to unmerge cells and move them around.
I think this is one of the main reason I started this web app as a 'timetable' view first and then build other features later on
I travel a lot. A lot. My humble suggestion would be to build this for you and not try at all to even try to get others to use it.
If you’re going for PMF and traction… It needs to have all sorts of Nikita Bier onboarding juice, remove all barriers and friction for not only the person setting this up but most importantly their companions. Time to first usefulness is currently minutes. It needs to be seconds. And then layers of social sharing work so that the content this app generates is stuff that will be easily shareable on Instagram. And then layers of contact adding stuff for vitality.
Then your next problem is people don’t go on trips that often, so at best your users can only use it in spurts a few times a year.
And your reward for all of that is then figuring out how to get money out of these users. Ads?
None of that should be bad news. It’s good news. The hard truth is this is not a marketable piece of software. It’s a classic tarpit.
You’ve clearly built something that YOU love and are passionate about. That’s awesome. Keep building it, and get that little burst of dopamine when you add a feature that you love that is perfectly designed for exactly 1 user, the only one who matters.
And then when a profitable idea pops into your head you know what it will take to bring it to life. And if it’s a truly great idea, one that helps your users make money, it wont need any of the soul crushing growth hacks described above, people will beg you to use it and put up with all manner of warts and bugs because it helps them make money.
I think it would be most useful in later stages of planning and sharing the result with friends. The major steps of planning a big trip (as I see it) are:
1. figuring out what activity options there are (brainstorming+researching what to do)
2. getting that into a sensible schedule with all constraints of opening hours, distance/travel between them, available time in the trip, budgets (either the glacier tour or that lodge with a skylight to see auroras, say), and preferences (some activities are cooler than two other ideas together)
3. booking
4. doing, and adapting on the fly as plans meet reality
I did these things in a Markdown file last time (CodiMD, specifically) and that worked surprisingly well. The big downside is that you can't have different views on the same data: to get from step 1 to 2, it would be cool if you can plot them on a map as an approximation of how much time you need to travel between them, or to give them all coordinates and have it show you a traveling salesman solution, just to have a starting point of what order makes sense. Or URLs for everything (info, reviews, booking status, ticket download..) gets messy. Ikuyo can view activities as a list and also as a map and also as a schedule, so that looks very promising!
Making a test trip, besides some unnecessary metadata like currencies (same, all euros) and target region ("various countries in Schengen" was not an option), I didn't really feel like it helped me get any of the stages done specifically. You need to pick a datetime for each activity up front, or you leave it as dummy, but either way you can't then drag&drop events to make a schedule. You need to open them up, press edit, and use the time selector UI. In Markdown, moving an event isn't drag&drop either but at least I can simply move the line to where on the schedule it makes sense and type the time directly
So I guess I'd put the activities in here once I've got a draft in Markdown? Then friends can view it in various ways. A friend previously (different trip than where I used Md) used a spreadsheet and that experience was relatively mediocre: Ikuyo would most definitely be better as a sharing format!
For during the trip, is there a way to save it offline? Comparing to Markdown or spreadsheets, I can download an HTML render or ODS file on my phone and view it any time, or even print it out. For viewing my trip on this website randomly during the trip ("what time did we need to be back in the village again?"), you'll always need internet and the website to be up right?
I had a peek at the source code as well and it looks all neat. After logging in, I needed to edit the URL to get back to the homepage (clicking the logo doesn't do it) and find the source link, but that's fine for me. The number of dependencies looks pretty reasonable and I could see myself hosting this!
Thanks for the feedback and trying them out. Having a 'bucket list' of activities (without exact times) is definitely on my horizon to implement next. The 'region' to select is mainly used for map so I can scope down to that region only, but I do see some need to specify several regions as it could be a common case for travel in Europe/Schengen area
This is going to be quite negative(sorry), but I don't really see the value here. Perhaps I don't really "get it", but I don't see how this helps you plan. It just lets you visualize the plan after you've created it.
I travel "full time" with my girlfriend, and she does most/all of the planning. The hard part isn't writing down what needs to be done, it's coming up with the plan in the first place.
First you pick a location, then you pick points of interest. Then you need to devise a route that makes sense that lets you see all those points and how you're going to get between them. Trains/buses/taxis, the timetable for those modes of transportation, the backup for when you're inevitably late, the "point of no return" where it's time to give up on that attraction.
For some places, reminders when tickets go on sale for the thing you want to do if it's extremely popular. Where it makes sense to do things as day trips and where it makes sense to just move to a more rural location/camp to see things. What to do with your luggage and how to move it from place to place.
Admittedly, I haven't signed up, I just looked at the free example and showed it to my girlfriend. She uses excel + google maps for visualizing the plan and we're not sure what this gives ontop of that. We're also always together in person, I could see how if you were far apart, perhaps the commenting and stuff could be useful?
Thanks for your feedback. Yeah I get that everyone has their workflow and it's okay to stick with them. For me, I used to have that Excel + Google Maps workflow too, but I feel like collaborating with person over the other side of the globe is such a pain in Excel, that's why I come up with this thing
It feels like everyone the past few years have been using Japanese for their side apps. I think this can lead to confusion.
on the other hand, if you add some more social elements it could be fun, theres a few apps that allow people to upload places and hotspots too so its more community driven, but also thats kinda instagram too.
Photo sharing is a good idea I think. I have family who do RVing and they use some app that lets them privately share their gallery. It’s cool to see where they are and what they are doing as they move around the country.
A gallery with a read-only private link would suffice.
Could you please consider using something other than recaptcha?
There's been several alternatives mentioned on HN over the past year. A quick search through my browser history revealed https://altcha.org/open-source-captcha/ as the most recent link I'd been to.
Just to say I have no experience of any of the "alternative" captchas, I just hate the one you're using.
Also please get your app up and running fast so we can use it for our vacation in early September, haha :-) Thank you.
Unfortunately I've been challenged with the Recaptcha quite often too. That part is apparently injected by my shared hosting service (Hostinger) with no ability to turn off even when I check with their support. I hosted this at my main site (kenrick95.org)'s shared hosting service as a subdomain since I don't need to pay extra to do so.
I might consider moving it out somewhere else if I decide to maintain it separately from my main site.
I would definitely recommend adding example images directly to the main page, along with the link to the example trip. Otherwise there's nothing really to draw users in to using if they have to go searching for how the experience looks like.
Thanks for your suggestion! I was hesitant at first cause it was under heavy development so anything I put there on main page might get outdated very soon. I'll add them very soon~
also just because your landing page now has an example featuring singapore - this is my guide to singapore http://swyx.io/sg-guide and i feel like encouraging people to make opinionated guides to where they live is kinda nice and under explored
I agree with you, though you might think about contributing to wikitravel too. This is their Singapore page: https://wikitravel.org/en/Singapore
yea but what matters is this is "my" page for "my" friends who specifically ask how i see singapore yknow
curation definitely is underexplored and I'd say we're seeing more of that in the future given the AI slob that's hitting us.
Hi swyx, great idea! Thanks for your tips
well screenshotting is easy and cheap + even if its outdated it helps communicate what you do
Also let the user do something without them making an account or verifying an email.
This is amazing. I've used wanderlog extensively, but while its feature set is great, it can be a nightmare to work due to how slow it can be sometimes.
I've just registered to test it out a little bit. I tried to replicate my upcoming trip that I have set up in Wanderlog, and have the following feedback:
- Overall, amazing! Snappy. Real easy to follow.
- I love the simplicity.
- I like that this is essentially excel (kind of), but with travel specific additions.
Now for the potential improvements:
- I can't add someone else as an editor, it seems. Clicking add just logs a "TripForm" with the form object. I don't see any network requests either.
- Expenses don't allow me to select how to split it (maybe this is an issue because there's no-one else part of the trip?)
- Timetable contrast needs a bit of work. Maybe needs some padding/margins or something.
- MapTiler doesn't seem to have a good enough database. I struggled to add 152 Morrison Road
- Activities can't span multiple days (I tried adding a train ride than arrived 45 mins past midnight)
- Adding/editing activities while on the timetable page, does not update them until I refresh (or navigate away)
Outside of all that, how are you planning to monetise this? The code is released under MIT, which doesn't stop anyone from adding some subscription plan, hosting it, and advertising it. May I suggest something like AGPL?
Thank you for trying them and providing such a detailed feedback!
- On Trip Sharing, hmm that seems weird. While I understand that there's no 'loading' indicator yet, one should be able to do so if one is the 'owner' of the trip
- Expense split: because that feature isn't there yet
- Thanks I'll consider it
- The map I chose on MapTiler is OpenStreetMap, but I limit it to Point-of-interest only, maybe I need to expand it to match more kind of objects
- Aha, for that case, I find that it's so troublesome that I have to split the activity into two different elements for display in the timetable, so I disabled the case for now. Thanks for a great use case!
- Hmm strange, the activites should reflect live. Maybe the 'back-end' is a bit slow
Anyway, the 'back-end' is InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com ) and it's opening a WebSocket connection, that's why you don't see network calls when doing operations
P.S. I don't think I'll monetise this ever. If someone forks it and monetise it, as long as it doesn't affect me, I think I'm fine with it. If I run out of my 'free usage' quota, I'll probably limit the users to only handful of people
The AGPL won't prevent anyone from adding some subscription plan, hosting it, and advertising it. It does require them to license derivative works under the AGPL.
There are many different goals for developing software, and different ways to make money doing it. The AGPL can be useful for some of them, but can be rather limiting too.
Hey figmert -- this is Peter, one of the co-founders of Wanderlog. I'm actually on a trip to Italy right now and definitely feel your pain with some performance issues, and we've been working hard to improve this.
If you haven't tried the app in the last few months, can you try it again and let me know what parts are feeling slow for you by emailing me directly at peter@wanderlog.com? I'd love to take a closer look, and especially if you've got specifics with screenshots/videos, I can try to fix some of these myself too.
Interesting app. Planning, expenses, and keeping people on track during the trip are some ways I'd think about using the app. TripIt is what we use for the latter. All things get recorded there starting with flights that bookend the trip. That's particularly low friction to get going. You know what you need to fill in next whether it's transport or accommodation.
Your app seems to appeal to the planner type of personality making it too high friction for me. I like to plan trips, but this approach is just way too heavyweight. If I was to suggest an approach that might augment what you have while being structured to an extent (I don't love the shared doc approach) is to allow someone to sketch an itinerary on a map. Then zoom to each general location and do searches for known things to add. Also allow the option to search for general things like restaurants in the vicinity. Bringing in this Google Maps-esque approach would help me.
What's your goal with the project?
I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.
My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.
My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.
I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:
1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.
2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.
3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.
I ended up winding it down and moving on.
I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.
Several things, but wide adoption is NOT one of them.
First and foremost, it's for my own personal use. I like to organize things and I find that the messy doc/spreadsheet way is way too messy for my liking, especially when I find a need to coordinate plans with other friends overseas. That's why I started this.
Secondly, it's for fun and for learning. I enjoy build websites and explore what browser can provide. I learned that browser have API for drag-and-drop element to pass data to a target element
So at the end of the day, I see it as a fun side project and nothing more.
Thanks for sharing your experience too :)
The landing page very much looks like a serious product looking for adoption, though. It might mislead users into thinking that it is intended to be something more than a fun side project.
Is there a harm in that, if it meets a user's requirements they can decide whether or not to use it, right?
A friend of mine built a similar thing as a mobile app and also failed to get adoption.
I think what these tools miss is that it’s kinda fun to plan a trip and I don’t necessarily need an app to help. It seems hard and like something I’ll need to learn once, and relearn when I need it again
Also I don’t want to plan out every second of my trips. Seems like this is useful for big trips with many people who need to be herded around, but in my estimation that kind of trip usually isn’t even that fun to begin with.
> The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction
This. If you want someone to use your thing, it needs to have a very strong value proposition over familiar general purpose tool.
This applies to basically every tool, but especially software.
I agree that anything that requires tripmates to make an account is going to be a hard sell for most groups. At least most people are already on Google Docs these days.
It's not clear to me how much of this requires an account, but I would encourage making as much as possible accessible without a login. Some people will want to help plan but there are also many people who just want to come along for the ride.
You gotta add debouncing or disable the button(s) once clicked and are pending for results; got several email codes and random errors because I clicked again thinking the button(s) didn’t work
Adding a sample trip might help a lot to give an idea of how to use it.
Inputs feel tedious and not smart enough; so much that it feels to get in the way instead of helping.
Activity date input shouldn’t be free date input; I inputted the start and end date earlier, couldn’t that be used to help limit the input range? End date/time feels tedious as well, it could be a duration input instead (eg 3h at this location).
It also lacks some extra planning features, like pooling the list of locations to visit (no dates yet), for later to be scheduled if it ends up interesting.
Personally I would remain using Wanderlog..
Thanks for the feedback and ideas!
Yeah, some of the input elements are quite 'basic' as they use browser default input element. I shall improve of them in due time...
This is cool. Having used similar apps (e.g. wanderlog), one thing they lack that I would LOVE is timetable filtering. When I travel, I find that I'm either in logistics mode or fun mode. Here's the idea:
In logistics mode, I want a detailed, precise timetable focused on transportation and lodging. I don't even want to see my fun ideas.
In fun mode, I want a relaxed set of suggestions based on my current location, and a single timestamp telling me when I need to go back into logistics mode.
Does that make sense? Its almost like I want two travel agents: a didactic drill sargeant to get me from A to B, and a chill surfer bum that helps me go with the flow.
Thanks for your kind words and ideas!
> Schedule activities with precise times and locations.
There's nothing I hate more than needing to be at a precise location at a precise time when I'm on vacation! (After all, it is a vacation.)
I used to be like this, but then my family grew to a size that we can't just go and walk in a restaurant and expect to have a table without a 60 minute wait. Traveling with a large family requires quite a bit more planning than just hopping on a random flight to a random country by yourself for two days.
Define "large family."
Anyway, a dinner reservation for a group of 20 is different than planning an entire vacation to the minute.
I empathise with this, but I am torn in half by the opposing hatred for regretting not doing a thing or visiting a place that I can only do when on holiday.
Well, everything in moderation! My comment was more a reaction to some peoples' tendency to over-plan and over-book to the minute.
Another open source app with a bit of similar goal: https://apps.kde.org/itinerary/
The collaboration part is not that developed (but does exist based on Matrix as decentralized and end to end encrypted storage). That works very well is ticket extraction for hotels, train or flight + search for connection using public transport APIs.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with that app
The program isn't particularly helpful for me because my workflow doesn't map out at all. First, we collect sights that we (the group!) want to see. Then everyone prioritizes what is more and less important to them. Then we check what discounts there are on public transport and which tourist tickets are available. This creates constraints as to what we might have to do on the same day. Then we sort the sights on the map. This creates further constraints as to what we have to do on the same day. And then we try to reconcile all of these constraints and interests by spreading the sights out over the days. I have no idea how I could do that with your program.
Looks nice! Since it's MIT licensed and I'd assume free to use, I'd suggest including that in the landing page. Since the homepage didn't include the keywords "price", "pricing", "free" or "cost" (related to pricing) I unfortunately thought it'd have dark patterns where you start planning a trip and then at some point it'd ask for payment.
Thanks for your kind words! Yeah great suggestion, I'll add them soon :)
Really nice, but it is unclear to me how time is represented with regard to timezones.
Some large countries may have multiple time zones, and itineraries can be confusing, this needs consideration from data modeling and ux side as well. The first glance at the UI didn't make it obvious for me how this is handled, I suppose local time is used always.
Yeah this is not that obvious, but the selected 'destination time zone' is the only time zone that one will be working with when planning the activities within the trip. (When inputting/reading the activities' time zone, they are all the destination's time zone)
The only local time zone used is at the comments (but hopefully it is clearer since I show the time zone offset there? I don't show it on the events since I feel it could be way too verbose)
I understand that there could be case where one's trip crosses multiple time zones, but at this moment that wasn't supported yet.
At the very least, you have to consider time zones for travel to/from your destination, as that's quite often a different time zone for international travel. Don't want to miss your flight...
That's a very valid use case I haven't thought of. Thanks for pointing it out!
First of all, it is very interesting to see how others expect to plan their vacation.
Previously, I had made a travel app for myself, however, it was different. The main feature was around the map and locations, with a necessary list of some POIs. When I was in the city, I used it to see if there was something interesting that I had pre-scouted not far from my location.
From the technical side, I took a look into the CSS and was surprised. Some of the CSS I could not even understand (like below), and there were thousands of different colours used hundreds of times. Not sure if it was by design.
grid-template-rows: [header]50px [macroplan]min-content [accommodation]min-content [t0000]var(--row-minute-narrow-height) [te0000 t0001]var(--row-minute-narrow-height) [te0001 t0002]var(--row-minute-narrow-height) ... in loop
Yup, it's using CSS Grid and since I have to declare the grid templates upfront, and my granularity is at minute level, it means I have to declare each minute of the day, i.e. 24 * 60 = 1440, as the rows of the grid
Seems similar to Wanderlog but less mature. I wish you best of luck!
Whatever you do, please do not make the app as slow as Wanderlog - I literally had to create an Android app to interact with my trips because their app isn't optimized at all!
Thank you for your kind words!
My current 'favorite idea I probably won't build' is an sms chat bot that does exactly this for guys in their 30s & 40s. The hard part is actually organizing the group of friends to pick a weekend and location. So a bot that can help with all of that first, is really compelling for me.
OP, let me know if you want to do a user group trying to help us organize a trip.
We're trying to build this over at https://tripjam.app
That is so me and my friends. There's about 20 of us in our group chat. Everyone has an opinion but not one guy wants to make a decision
This is funny (in a good way) because there's a YC company that actually does the same: https://www.flowtrip.app/
Would it be possible to determine the best order for visiting a set of places?
Yes it is a sort of TSP, but you cannot assume fixed weights (as some roads can be open only some times of the day)
Neat! I'd like to give this a try with my family.
I noticed the MIT license, any plans to document how someone could self host this? Or would you be open to contributions from other people to do that?
Thank you!
Probably you just need to copy `.env.example` into `.env` and replace the required API keys. [1] The whole 'back-end' is an external dependency hosted elsewhere by InstantDB [2] While they claim that you can self-host it too, I haven't been bothered to self-host it myself. Other than that, I'm using MapTiler Cloud for the mapping service [3] since I find that while there are free ones, those can be quite limited when doing things like geocoding (querying keyword to coordinates).
[1] https://github.com/kenrick95/ikuyo/blob/main/.env.example
[2] https://github.com/instantdb/instant
[3] https://www.maptiler.com/
Sounds interesting, but I (and I suppose others reaching the landing page might be as well) was discouraged to check it out because it requires me to sign up to learn more.
Yeah I agree, haven't get around that part yet since the auth part is handled by 3rd party (InstantDB). However you can use throwaway email service and it accepts that too
How are you storing the trip data? Do I have export options?
I would love to see room planning built in. We book cottages for staycation with multiple families. It would be nice to allocate people to room's
Thank you for the ideas!
My family and I have a trip to London/Paris in July with children. Tried Wanderlog and it's not great. Going to give this a try!
Hi! Co-founder of Wanderlog (YC W19) here - what issues did you run into with it? I'd love to get your take to see if there's anything we can do there.
Just move to Canada. Paris is a one hour drive from London.
I mean in Europe they’re also just a few hours train ride apart. (Or a few hours drive where your car rides the train.)
I love this. In the past I've used Airtable, but not having a map made things messier for me.
It would be nice to link with other apps
Both your privacy policy and your terms of service mention contacting you, but i don't see a way to do so.
Thanks for pointing out! Will fix that soon
What key feature are you providing that can't be easily done by a google sheet?
Hmmm okay so I come from Excel world and when I arrange my plans in timetable view (in Excel), I need to 'merge' several cells together. However if circumstances change and I have to rearrange those events to other days or other timings, it become a pain to unmerge cells and move them around.
I think this is one of the main reason I started this web app as a 'timetable' view first and then build other features later on
France is in your destination list twice with nothing differentiating the two entries.
Thanks for pointing out! Fix should be deployed soon
Do you have sample credentials?
Sorry I couldn't provide them, however you can use throwaway email service to get around that part
I'm unable to resend the verification code. Can you allow to do it?
Just a heads up. The app doesn't load if WebGL is disabled.
Nice app, nice idea you thought of.
Right in time for the summer!
I travel a lot. A lot. My humble suggestion would be to build this for you and not try at all to even try to get others to use it.
If you’re going for PMF and traction… It needs to have all sorts of Nikita Bier onboarding juice, remove all barriers and friction for not only the person setting this up but most importantly their companions. Time to first usefulness is currently minutes. It needs to be seconds. And then layers of social sharing work so that the content this app generates is stuff that will be easily shareable on Instagram. And then layers of contact adding stuff for vitality.
Then your next problem is people don’t go on trips that often, so at best your users can only use it in spurts a few times a year.
And your reward for all of that is then figuring out how to get money out of these users. Ads?
None of that should be bad news. It’s good news. The hard truth is this is not a marketable piece of software. It’s a classic tarpit.
You’ve clearly built something that YOU love and are passionate about. That’s awesome. Keep building it, and get that little burst of dopamine when you add a feature that you love that is perfectly designed for exactly 1 user, the only one who matters.
And then when a profitable idea pops into your head you know what it will take to bring it to life. And if it’s a truly great idea, one that helps your users make money, it wont need any of the soul crushing growth hacks described above, people will beg you to use it and put up with all manner of warts and bugs because it helps them make money.
This looks quite cool!
I think it would be most useful in later stages of planning and sharing the result with friends. The major steps of planning a big trip (as I see it) are:
1. figuring out what activity options there are (brainstorming+researching what to do)
2. getting that into a sensible schedule with all constraints of opening hours, distance/travel between them, available time in the trip, budgets (either the glacier tour or that lodge with a skylight to see auroras, say), and preferences (some activities are cooler than two other ideas together)
3. booking
4. doing, and adapting on the fly as plans meet reality
I did these things in a Markdown file last time (CodiMD, specifically) and that worked surprisingly well. The big downside is that you can't have different views on the same data: to get from step 1 to 2, it would be cool if you can plot them on a map as an approximation of how much time you need to travel between them, or to give them all coordinates and have it show you a traveling salesman solution, just to have a starting point of what order makes sense. Or URLs for everything (info, reviews, booking status, ticket download..) gets messy. Ikuyo can view activities as a list and also as a map and also as a schedule, so that looks very promising!
Making a test trip, besides some unnecessary metadata like currencies (same, all euros) and target region ("various countries in Schengen" was not an option), I didn't really feel like it helped me get any of the stages done specifically. You need to pick a datetime for each activity up front, or you leave it as dummy, but either way you can't then drag&drop events to make a schedule. You need to open them up, press edit, and use the time selector UI. In Markdown, moving an event isn't drag&drop either but at least I can simply move the line to where on the schedule it makes sense and type the time directly
So I guess I'd put the activities in here once I've got a draft in Markdown? Then friends can view it in various ways. A friend previously (different trip than where I used Md) used a spreadsheet and that experience was relatively mediocre: Ikuyo would most definitely be better as a sharing format!
For during the trip, is there a way to save it offline? Comparing to Markdown or spreadsheets, I can download an HTML render or ODS file on my phone and view it any time, or even print it out. For viewing my trip on this website randomly during the trip ("what time did we need to be back in the village again?"), you'll always need internet and the website to be up right?
I had a peek at the source code as well and it looks all neat. After logging in, I needed to edit the URL to get back to the homepage (clicking the logo doesn't do it) and find the source link, but that's fine for me. The number of dependencies looks pretty reasonable and I could see myself hosting this!
Thanks for the feedback and trying them out. Having a 'bucket list' of activities (without exact times) is definitely on my horizon to implement next. The 'region' to select is mainly used for map so I can scope down to that region only, but I do see some need to specify several regions as it could be a common case for travel in Europe/Schengen area
just created an account, only to be greeted with a white screen... https://ikuyo.kenrick95.org/trip/4725b43a-595b-433d-b746-79c... seems the app not ready for primetime...
ah damn... this might take a while to debug, as I don't have any error monitoring setup yet ._.
May I check what's your browser & version? Thanks
What stack are you using? You probably can get away with the free tier of sentry and posthog for a while for error monitoring and observability
It is React on the front-end with InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com/ ) as its back-end.
I was trying not to add more external SDK since it contributes to the bundle size. Adding Sentry soon for some observability.
This is going to be quite negative(sorry), but I don't really see the value here. Perhaps I don't really "get it", but I don't see how this helps you plan. It just lets you visualize the plan after you've created it.
I travel "full time" with my girlfriend, and she does most/all of the planning. The hard part isn't writing down what needs to be done, it's coming up with the plan in the first place.
First you pick a location, then you pick points of interest. Then you need to devise a route that makes sense that lets you see all those points and how you're going to get between them. Trains/buses/taxis, the timetable for those modes of transportation, the backup for when you're inevitably late, the "point of no return" where it's time to give up on that attraction.
For some places, reminders when tickets go on sale for the thing you want to do if it's extremely popular. Where it makes sense to do things as day trips and where it makes sense to just move to a more rural location/camp to see things. What to do with your luggage and how to move it from place to place.
Admittedly, I haven't signed up, I just looked at the free example and showed it to my girlfriend. She uses excel + google maps for visualizing the plan and we're not sure what this gives ontop of that. We're also always together in person, I could see how if you were far apart, perhaps the commenting and stuff could be useful?
Thanks for your feedback. Yeah I get that everyone has their workflow and it's okay to stick with them. For me, I used to have that Excel + Google Maps workflow too, but I feel like collaborating with person over the other side of the globe is such a pain in Excel, that's why I come up with this thing
Show screenshots. Show how me and my family will use it and feel.
Thanks for your feedback. I'll add them soon
Friend (co-worker) had a similar ideas around travel management and he built this.
Fully open sourced https://github.com/CopilotKit/CopilotKit/tree/main/examples/...
In case you find it useful.
https://examples-coagents-ai-travel-app-git-main-copilot-kit...
It feels like everyone the past few years have been using Japanese for their side apps. I think this can lead to confusion.
on the other hand, if you add some more social elements it could be fun, theres a few apps that allow people to upload places and hotspots too so its more community driven, but also thats kinda instagram too.
Photo sharing is a good idea I think. I have family who do RVing and they use some app that lets them privately share their gallery. It’s cool to see where they are and what they are doing as they move around the country.
A gallery with a read-only private link would suffice.
Haha thanks! Yeah might be a good idea if there are lots of usage, but for now it's mostly me and close friends so not much yet
Could you please consider using something other than recaptcha?
There's been several alternatives mentioned on HN over the past year. A quick search through my browser history revealed https://altcha.org/open-source-captcha/ as the most recent link I'd been to.
Just to say I have no experience of any of the "alternative" captchas, I just hate the one you're using.
Also please get your app up and running fast so we can use it for our vacation in early September, haha :-) Thank you.
Thanks for the feedback!
Unfortunately I've been challenged with the Recaptcha quite often too. That part is apparently injected by my shared hosting service (Hostinger) with no ability to turn off even when I check with their support. I hosted this at my main site (kenrick95.org)'s shared hosting service as a subdomain since I don't need to pay extra to do so.
I might consider moving it out somewhere else if I decide to maintain it separately from my main site.