Nice one, this looks like a good starting point for trips.
One thing I'm confused by is the "$$$" signs on trips. They seem to be roughly the inverse of what I'd expect. My guess is that these are trying to combine too many aspects – travel distance, duration, price perception of the destination – and that because of this they're somewhat meaningless.
Example, Paris for 3 days is $$$, and LA for 3 days is $$. Paris is definitely cheaper than LA when you're there assuming you don't do a tour of tourist traps, it has cheap public transport, and for me it's a cheap train journey away. Conversely, LA is an expensive international flight away, expensive to stay/eat out in, and expensive to get around. I assume the $ signs are this way around on basis of US tourists travelling domestically?
In a similar vein, I suspect the budget part of the site just won't translate well. Budgets might vary by an order of magnitude depending on where you're coming from, what sort of transport options you use while you're there, whether you choose to stay in upmarket hotels or cheap places, which restaurants you go to, etc.
The dollar sign scale is meant to indicate what kind of trip the creator planned: budget vs luxury. But you are right, it doesn’t really account for all the nuances of a trip. I was hoping having the trip budget section would help as you could get an average amount spent for each of the categories: lodging, food, activities, transportation. You gave me a lot to think about though, thanks for that!
I have to say, it's really difficult to search for London. I got a ton of results from various boroughs from London, I got some London from Arkansas, I never got London proper.
If I type "london" and hit return, I end up on the unfiltered "Latest" page.
That seems something happening in quite some other apps, missing the obvious thing that when I as a tourist search for "London" I definitely don't care/don't know about Brixton, Leyton or Thingamajig. I'd be looking for the Big Ben and the Tower and other such tourist traps. If I wanted some hidden treasure in Crystal Palace then I'd have searched for that.
Yes! Exactly. You can copy other people’s entire itinerary, a single day, or a single event and paste them into your own. There’s also ways to communicate with the trip creator if you wanted to collaborate that way. Or you could invite people to build a trip together.
I see now, when you explain it like this I understand why you used the term "open source". In a very literal sense though "open source" means the source is open, and there usually is no "source" used to create an itinerary except the mind of the creator, and hopefully that isn't open :D
Sorry to be picky about wording, it's definitely a cool project!
Paid, but Tripit Pro pays for itself if you fly a lot with its Fare Tracker- you get notifications of flight cost changes so you can call the airline and get your money back, usually in credit. I've gotten more back in just my last two flights that covers their yearly fee. I don't know another service that offers this.
I have read the HN title and had no clue what was it that you built. Maybe changing "open source" to "open-source", or even better, figure out what you actually wanted to say and rephrase that part, as I don't _think_ this constitutes for open-source. It's just confusing instead of helping.
So I clicked the link...and landed on the signup page. Nothing else. Just a signup form. Would be good to have some context before asking me to sign up. Maybe some screenshots, some features mentioned...
Hey, sorry about that. It’s actually supposed to take you to the landing page. It works on the desktop but for mobile devices it’s throwing up that signup modal. I’ll fix that soon. Thanks for pointing that out. Clicking on “home” will close out the login screen and take you to the landing page.
It would be awesome to have a map view where I could visualize the itinerary and the times and distances between each place.
It's a lot easier to plan an itinerary (especially one when driving over many days) when I can see where and when I'll be with the distances and travel times. Creating overly ambitious itineraries where there's not enough time at each place can be a problem.
I recently booked a trip in India through a travel agent, and they shared the itinerary via https://travefy.com/. I enjoyed using the app to review the schedule for the upcoming day and that sort of thing. No idea how much of my fee went towards that.
- You can subscribe to your TripIt calendar, so that all of your trip details automatically show up on your personal calendar app. You only have to do this once (not for every trip). If like me, you use your calendar to run your life, this is a huge productivity benefit.
- You can forward your flight confirmation emails and accommodation booking emails from most hotels, trip booking sites (e.g. Booking.com, Kayak, Amex Travel) and even Airbnb/VRBO/etc. to TripIt, and they parse the contents and add the details to your itinerary
- For me, it's now become my source of record for when I was last in/out of the country, which I find super useful for US immigration stuff (green card, global entry, citizenship applications, etc.) and some non-US visa applications too
- If your company uses Concur for travel/expense management, you can link your work account as well so that work trips show up there too
- I think this might be a Pro feature, but you can get alerts of gate changes, flight delays, baggage carousel assignments, etc., oftentimes even before your airline informs you
- I don't use this as much, but you can also invite people to individual trips and they automatically get all itinerary updates
There's lots more benefits, but these are my top ones that come to mind. The UI is super old school, which I don't love, but the convenience far outweighs this and some of the other cons for me.
Hey, so I just realized there's a bug when visiting the link via a mobile device where it will show a login screen. If you are using a mobile device, if you click the "home" link at the top left of that login screen, it will take you to the home page where you can demo existing itineraries.
I think it would be nice to allow for options with regard to stops. It wouldn't be any fun for a particular itinerary to become so popular that the businesses listed on it couldn't keep up or had their ambiance ruined. Defaulting to "template" itineraries where some stops had a choice of venues might alleviate some of that pressure. I see that some itineraries have alternatives in a given stop's description, but there's no place to list contact info for them without it becoming crowded.
Not sure if this addresses what you are getting at but there’s a feature that lets you overlap stops and it’ll turn that particular stop into a carousel that you can use to browse other suggestion. This was added after a lot of the itineraries were already created which is why the alternatives exist in the description.
Hi, open-source is in reference to the travel itineraries. People can post travel itineraries and other people can modify them to make them their own and re-share them.
Right, but that's not what "open source" means. Open source refers specifically to the code of the service being licensed under an OSI-approved license.
Hey! your app looks really cool, and what really amazed me is how fast it loads (I won't make any opinion on how many trips or itineraries it has now).
As regarding UI a few tips:
- when opening an itinerary, it'll be great if I can close it just clicking outside it.
- when searching for a city/place, it'll be great if the photo changes to actually that place ;) (I was somehow confused that always I see the machu pichu photo).
Thanks for the suggestions! I like them and added them to my todo list. Someone else also mentioned they'd like to be able to click outside to close the itinerary.
Love the idea. Only issue I had with was the $$$ bit, it's not clear what I am looking at. Think there should be an option to see a approximate ranges in $ for the trips.
If I am using a site like this, I would want to quickly scan a $ range and then see if there's anything I like in there.
Again, love the idea and congrats on shipping. Bookmarked will be visiting again :)
Someone else also commented on the "$$$" and suggested the use of labels instead. Would you find labels like "budget", "luxury", "family friendly," more useful?
Looks pretty nice, but I do have two things that would be great to see: Being able to open an itinerary in a new tab, and being able to click off the pop-up to go back to the itinerary list.
Hi, sorry there's a bug when visiting on a mobile device where it will show you a login screen. I didn't mean for that to be the case. Clicking on "home" at the top left of the screen will take you to the homepage. Thanks for the feedback!
I feel like this is a platform for exploiting free labor more than a useful tool to help plan traveling. I do not feel "open source" spirit.
I generally don't believe you are an avid traveler building a platform to make your life easier.
> Discover the future of travel planning with TripGeeks' AI-powered itinerary generator! AI takes the hassle out of planning your dream vacation by curating personalized itineraries based on your interests, preferences, and travel style.
:/ :( "Community"
> TripGeeks is a community based travel platform to create and share itineraries with others.
This site says it is community based, but I am not sure where that community comes from. For it to be community based I would expect a member of an already existing community to build something for that community, rather than something being built in hopes of creating a community.
This site is absolutely worse than just showing up at the best rated hostel in a city and having the hostel workers tell you what to do. The expensive hotel suggestions rather than budget hotel and hostel suggestions is clear evidence, imho, of the corruptive power of affiliate marketing and industry first rather than traveler first thinking.
I feel visually assaulted when I click on a trip. I feel like 20 different UI elements are violently vying for my attention. The command bar on the left overloads the senses. My attention is not drawn in any particular location.
50% of the left side bar needs to be horizontal on top as tabs instead of vertically tiled.
A translations tab doesn't belong. Things like language and currency belong on the info page.
The info page itself should have a lot more structured trip metadata than what shows up.
There should be a summary of daily activities near the top of the daily itinerary pages.
The itinerary options is not very well surfaced in the UI.
The pictures themselves frequently feel pretty discordant and clash-y.
The photos do not have associated text/alt text of what they are.
Escape doesn't close the current trip.
The icons on the main page on the right of {featured, latest, top, search} don't have alt text telling you what they do when you hover over them.
Loading the different modes not only lags, but it doesn't have a "loading" image to let you know that the site is working, but slow.
You should probably use web tools to load the site as if you were on a poor connection since there is a high likelihood of using a phone and not bringing a full sized device on a trip.
Use of affiliates for making money is not explained, my ad block also blocks your affiliates. Saying you're "open source", asking for tips, and not explaining affiliate usage rubs me the wrong way.
The "leave a tip" isn't clickable, so I don't see any way to leave a tip if I wanted to.
Yelp has zero value as a review platform (same with tripadvisor), the only review platform with any value is google maps.
I don't see a rating on your trips, only a binary like or not like.
Some of your links are broken. You should probably write a nightly cron job validating all external links on your website. At the very least an "issue" should be generated for all broken links.
The natural lifecycle of everything like this is to eventually offer travel based advertisements or to be corrupted by affiliates. There is a reason just about all travel planning platforms suck, and those same forces that make other sites suck apply to you too. I don't see how you're different.
It feels like you have hustle, which I don't love. It also feels like you are using HN primarily for self promotion, which I also don't love.
Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll do my best to address them.
> I feel like this is a platform for exploiting free labor more than a useful tool to help plan traveling. I do not feel "open source" spirit.
- There’s actually a profit-sharing program that I'm experimenting with. Basically if a trip you create makes money you share in the revenue. The site isn’t actually making any money right now so the details of this is still being worked out.
> I generally don't believe you are an avid traveler building a platform to make your life easier.
- I built this site because I am not an avid traveler, but someone who wants to travel a lot more. And as someone who doesn’t know all the best places to visit or eat or things I need to do and etc, I thought it’d be great to have place where all that knowledge is prepared for you, perhaps by local experts, in the form on an itinerary. Basically just trying to make traveling a lot simpler and maybe even more exciting.
> This site says it is community based, but I am not sure where that community comes from. For it to be community based I would expect a member of an already existing community to build something for that community, rather than something being built in hopes of creating a community.
- Not sure if that’s a bad thing. I don’t think a community like this exists and I think it’d be great if it did.
> This site is absolutely worse than just showing up at the best rated hostel in a city and having the hostel workers tell you what to do. The expensive hotel suggestions rather than budget hotel and hostel suggestions is clear evidence, imho, of the corruptive power of affiliate marketing and industry first rather than traveler first thinking.
- Anyone can create a trip and suggest any hotel they wish. I would love it if the hostel worker you are referring to created and shared a trip on the platform, then everyone would get access to this much better trip that you are speaking of.
- The links in the descriptions of the current trips available aren’t tied to any affiliate marketing links.
I think most of the other stuff you pointed out are UI and implementation suggestions. Thank you for those, I’ve added them to a list of things to do.
> - There’s actually a profit-sharing program that I'm experimenting with. Basically if a trip you create makes money you share in the revenue. The site isn’t actually making any money right now so the details of this is still being worked out.
I would consider writing your mission more clearly on your about us. Right now I feel like you have the standard mission that is rotting America: make money
Additionally all of the "we" turns me off, because I don't think it's true. You are hoping to build a platform for community. Once you build a community you can change it to "we", but right now I don't think "we" stuff is a good choice. I think if you showed that to the ghost of Steve Jobs, he'd have yelled you out of his office. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28826437 -- worth googling for the whole thread if you don't use twitter)
If community is central to your goal, then I think you've taken a wrong approach because monetization/transactionality is an anathema to community.
> Our mission is to make traveling simple by taking the planning out of vacation planning so that you can focus on what matters the most, the experience.
What you learn from traveling pretty quickly is that the experience barely matters at all and it's the people you share experiences with that mean everything. Good people make bad experiences a great story. No people makes many experiences largely forgettable. You haven't truly felt alone until you've seen/done something really cool and worth sharing alone, and then when you get back, you realize that no one really cares about your experiences other than if they should do it themselves.
> I built this site because I am not an avid traveler, but someone who wants to travel a lot more. And as someone who doesn’t know all the best places to visit or eat or things I need to do and etc, I thought it’d be great to have place where all that knowledge is prepared for you, perhaps by local experts, in the form on an itinerary. Basically just trying to make traveling a lot simpler and maybe even more exciting.
Optimization is the enemy of just doing it, and I wholeheartedly recommend just doing it. I've had great experiences literally just walking around, that goes triple if food is a big deal to you.
Here's what I recommend before you continue all this: Pick two cities you want to visit.
Go to hostelworld and find 2 or 3 hostels in those cities with a high rating (≥ 9.0) and a large number of reviews (I recommend against American cities, America's tourism culture is hot garbage). Look at the pictures of the hostels and make sure they have a common room, generally with a communal table and couches, potentially a pool table or darts, etc. Higher capacity hostels are usually better. Your goal here is less the tourism and more to understand hostels.
Book a week, and move to each of the different 2-3 hostels over that week. When you check in ask the front desk what there is to do and eat. If the hostel is a bust, try more conventional means of finding activities/food. In the morning, eat what the hostel offers in the common room or go to a nearby convenience store/street food and eat it in the hostel common room around others. Your goal is to overhear other people talking and invite yourself into their conversations and/or directly invite people to eat with you etc. I think you fancy yourself an entrepreneur and if you do, this is a great exercise regardless of the travel.
It is totally common and acceptable to pull out your laptop in the common room and work on your website.
I think that experience is very important to informing you about travel, community, and how sane people (solo) travel vs whatever it is that Americans do.
hostelworld, rome2rio, and couchsurfing are generally great apps. Couchsurfing had (maybe has?) a hangout feature that was fantastic. Culture trip frequently had the best curated travel content, atlas/gastro obsucra were also not bad.
Thanks! I think I understand where you are coming from. There’s a balance between corporate BS and authenticity, and right now the overall impression you are getting is more weighted towards corporate BS. I built a lot of projects and this is the one is probably the one I was most excited to build. I do travel (probably done more of the “American hot garbage variation of it.”), but I want to travel a lot more. One thing that really excited me about the idea of “open sourcing itineraries” is that it could surface more kinds of trips than your standard cookie cutter ones. It’s an experiment and I appreciate your feedback on this. Thank you.
One thing I'm confused by is the "$$$" signs on trips. They seem to be roughly the inverse of what I'd expect. My guess is that these are trying to combine too many aspects – travel distance, duration, price perception of the destination – and that because of this they're somewhat meaningless.
Example, Paris for 3 days is $$$, and LA for 3 days is $$. Paris is definitely cheaper than LA when you're there assuming you don't do a tour of tourist traps, it has cheap public transport, and for me it's a cheap train journey away. Conversely, LA is an expensive international flight away, expensive to stay/eat out in, and expensive to get around. I assume the $ signs are this way around on basis of US tourists travelling domestically?
In a similar vein, I suspect the budget part of the site just won't translate well. Budgets might vary by an order of magnitude depending on where you're coming from, what sort of transport options you use while you're there, whether you choose to stay in upmarket hotels or cheap places, which restaurants you go to, etc.