For the last several weeks, I have just been sleeping, eating, operating and developing itineraries.io. Rinse and repeat.
I work as a surgeon in the UK. My main other passions are travel and programming. Recently, when I haven't been stitching someone up, I've been working on my project.
Having always dreamed of exploring the world as a child, I struck a goldmine when I found a wife who shared the same love of adventure as me. We couldn't afford to travel much when we first met at university. Over the last couple of years, since both entering the workforce, we have been able to live out some of our dreams. It has been wonderful. We now have a little one coming along and I can't wait to adventure as a family.
I created itineraries.io because my wife and I usually rely on making Excel spreadsheets for our travels. These eventually become quite detailed. I thought a better user experience could be designed, and a community could grow from it centred around adventure.
Here are the main benefits I envision of using itineraires.io:
- Everything you need for your trip stored in one location (tickets, driving directions, travel documents, etc)
- Collaborative planning: plan your trip with your companions by sending a joining link via email
- Community: save your favourite itineraries made by others, clone them with a single click, and make them your own
I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback :)
Samar
Another comment I have is that the product description on the web page is sparse, so I was hesitant to sign up. Maybe there should be an "About" section?
A modern TripIt replacement is overdue and I will be glad to try alternatives.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders
On plus side, as someone suggested LLMs like ChatGPT should be a very good fit for email parsing and easy to integrate (e.g. ChatGPT API asking to output JSON).
But yes I do generally like it even if a lot of chit chat, appointment reminders, and the like have migrated to messaging.
For launches like this, the blocker for me signing up is seeing an example of the UI. Productivity tools, especially ones for trip planning are so heavily design + vibes based that I'd need to see what it looks like before considering how it would be helpful for me. I think others might feel similar as well.
Congrats on the launch and good luck!
Would be nice to make these optional. Just throw me into the canvas and if I want to add people then make email required.
Worst case (often the case) those email addresses get collected and eventually sold off to some marketing spam list that just adds more junk to my inbox and adds a little bit more information to some marketing profile about me somewhere.
A video demo would definitely help demonstrate that at least there's a "there" there.
Rather than rëengineer your site, consider just putting up a static walkthrough of key features, or a short video demo.
Cheers!
I’ve tried many “travel apps”, and we recently used Tripsy⁽¹⁾ for a two week holiday and the iOS widget showing the “current activity” and “next activity” of your itinerary (for easy access to PDF tickets, notes, etc.) was really great! You can even turn your phone sideways to show the name and address of your next stop in large print which is great for taxis.
It has sharing/collaboration, integrations for over 700 sites, and also syncs to your Calendar so you can see your itinerary there.
Very well done app that I thought was worth a mention. (It has a web UI as well.)
⁽¹⁾ https://tripsy.app/
Some issues I faced after trying it out for few minutes:
- When creating itineraries, I filled in the country field, but upon pressing enter or the arrow button, it just disappeared?
- On the same text field, I'm on dark mode, but the color contrast is quite poor (can't read the placeholder text)
- When I'm on the per-day itinerary planning page, when entering the hh:mm field, it didn't move my focus to the next one (so if I want to enter 08:00, I have to enter "8" then <tab> then "8" then <tab> then "0" then <tab> then "0"
- After I entered the hh:mm and press the plus icon, I suppose we're supposed to enter the plans starting that time. So I enter some stuff to it, and upon pressing enter, it appears there. It's fine, but it feels like the UX would be better if the text box is autofocused again, so we can quickly enter several plans for that timing
- I'm confused with the "edit"/"editing" button, not sure what it does... but when the text goes to "editing", I can delete some items I guess?
Anyway that's all I have for now. Sorry for the long wall of text.
Cheers~
My unsent feedback was:
I clicked on an itinerary on the home page, was asked to sign up/in, signed in with Google, and was taken to https://itineraries.io/home instead of the itinerary I had clicked on.
It would be good to be able to explore itineraries without having to sign up/in to see what the site is about, but if you're determined to get people to sign in, at least take them to where they wanted to go afterwards.
Nitpick: The spinning globe is painfully obviously a flat image. It's also spinning in the wrong direction ;)