Show HN: I built a web app to open source travel itineraries
tripgeeks.app
I made TripGeeks, a website where you create and share travel itineraries. Would love to hear any feedback you might have.
Thanks!
tripgeeks.app
Thanks!
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!
Perhaps you could have tags for things like budget, luxury, family appropriate/kid friendly, educational, relaxing, etc.
If I type "london" and hit return, I end up on the unfiltered "Latest" page.
Not a huge deal, but some type of weighting like what maps and flight search apps have might be a good addition.
Sorry to be picky about wording, it's definitely a cool project!
https://www.tripit.com/web/blog/news-culture/get-money-back-...
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...
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.
- 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.
I use TripIt as the foundation for all of mine.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
This sites pretty good IIRC: https://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page
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.