[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a web app to open source travel iti...
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       Show HN: I built a web app to open source travel itineraries
        
       I made TripGeeks, a website where you create and share travel
       itineraries. Would love to hear any feedback you might have.
       Thanks!
        
       Author : onounoko
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2024-03-28 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tripgeeks.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tripgeeks.app)
        
       | leland wrote:
       | Sounds interesting, any way to demo without creating an account?
        
         | onounoko wrote:
         | Hi, do you mean demo creating trips? if so, unfortunately,
         | that's not possible right now without an account.
        
       | danpalmer wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | onounoko wrote:
         | Thanks for the feedback!
         | 
         | 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!
        
           | danpalmer wrote:
           | I think budget/luxury tags would be good without being too
           | price specific, although I imagine many trips would be
           | both/neither.
           | 
           | Perhaps you could have tags for things like budget, luxury,
           | family appropriate/kid friendly, educational, relaxing, etc.
        
       | madeofpalk wrote:
       | What fortunate timing - I see this as I'm procrastinating putting
       | together a travel itinerary for my parents!
        
       | relyks wrote:
       | Wanderlog is also really good for this type of thing:
       | https://wanderlog.com/. I'm a pretty active user of it, but
       | TripGeeks also looks cool
        
         | figmert wrote:
         | Albeit slow, it's an amazing app. Even solo trips are really
         | good to plan on this. I wish there was a self hosted version of
         | it.
        
       | clawoo wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | onounoko wrote:
         | Thanks for pointing that out, I know it's very clunky to use at
         | the moment. It's something I'm looking to fix in my next
         | update.
        
           | browningstreet wrote:
           | Same for Budapest. One Budapest would be fine.
        
         | soco wrote:
         | 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_.
        
         | funmi wrote:
         | Came here to post exactly this. I searched for Barcelona, and
         | the most widely known Barcelona was 6th in the list:
         | https://i.postimg.cc/tJyLvCbk/Screenshot-2024-03-28-at-5-19-...
         | 
         | Not a huge deal, but some type of weighting like what maps and
         | flight search apps have might be a good addition.
        
       | ivanjermakov wrote:
       | I think it's better to link homepage, not login page.
        
       | pushedx wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | carlosjobim wrote:
         | In your opinion, what is the advantages of such an app compared
         | to a PDF?
        
           | CtrlAltDelete51 wrote:
           | Flexibility for changes being reflected in realtime without
           | needing to version PDFs.
           | 
           | I use TripIt as the foundation for all of mine.
        
           | funmi wrote:
           | I also use TripIt and am a big fan of:
           | 
           | - 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.
        
       | eetus wrote:
       | A bit of a nit: the background image features Machu Picchu, but
       | searching for Peru yields no results.
        
       | mattmar96 wrote:
       | looking good!
        
       | Mystery-Machine wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | onounoko wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | sss111 wrote:
       | haha i like this, its like pcpartpicker but for travel!!
        
       | pwillia7 wrote:
       | Also see https://www.localeur.com/
        
       | oldtimesnever wrote:
       | 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).
        
       | Maultasche wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Zambyte wrote:
       | What does "open source" mean here?
        
         | joshmlewis wrote:
         | It means being able to make travel itineraries public /
         | shareable for other people to use for their own.
        
           | onounoko wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | underlipton wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | onounoko wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | marsbars241 wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-28 23:01 UTC)