[HN Gopher] Show HN: Itineraries.io - I built a joint trip plann...
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Show HN: Itineraries.io - I built a joint trip planner in between
surgeries
Hey HN, 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
Author : samaralihussain
Score : 81 points
Date : 2024-10-09 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (itineraries.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (itineraries.io)
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I love things like this. And it's impressive that you do surgery
| + travel + programming. I can hardly manage just the last one.
|
| 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!
| samaralihussain wrote:
| hey that's a really good point - thank you :) Still consider
| myself a bit of a newbie, so really grateful to hear tips such
| as yours. I'll get working on it!
| xyst wrote:
| Experience is quite janky on mobile. Adding a new "task" and the
| UI elements disappear.
|
| I'll try again on desktop later.
| samaralihussain wrote:
| Hey thank you - I'm still trying to optimise the mobile
| experience. It's primarily meant to be desktop based. Will get
| working on it for you!
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| You will get far with "primarily desktop" in 2024
| orangewindies wrote:
| It's an interesting idea but why would I sign up and give you
| personal data without any idea of the site's features or UI?
| xyst wrote:
| I found this annoying as well. I just give a junk first and
| last name and throwaway email.
|
| Would be nice to make these optional. Just throw me into the
| canvas and if I want to add people then make email required.
| samaralihussain wrote:
| Interesting point - I personally am fairly easy about signing
| up to cool new products that I like the sound of. Although it
| makes sense that some people might be hesitant to give details
| away so easily. Do you reckon featuring a video demo would help
| mitigate this?
| zdragnar wrote:
| At minimum, I assume if I sign up you're going to start
| emailing me, and I haven't even seen enough to decide if I'm
| actually interested yet.
|
| 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.
| trevor-e wrote:
| Not OP but have the same frustration, and no a video would
| not be helpful. Let users maybe view the first N items of an
| itinerary before requiring an account to see the full thing.
| As-is I have no incentive to sign up for an account because
| everything interesting is account-walled.
| reustle wrote:
| Letting the public trips be visible would make the most
| sense. I'll create an account when I'd like to make my own
| trip.
| mda wrote:
| I also didn't login to the site. I wanted to see what it is
| about, but why do I need to sign in to see information?
| below43 wrote:
| Same here. I was keen to see the functionality first.
| Encountering a sign-up form as the first step is an instant
| closing of the tab for me.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| The confusing thing about this strategy to me is-ok let's
| say I give you my email and I hate the product.
|
| What benefit do you get from that?
|
| Are you going to send me an email reminding me to try it
| again? That's going straight to spam.
|
| If I like the product-at some point I'll have to sign up,
| and then you have my email.
|
| Why the intermediate step? The only thing that comes to
| mind is limiting resource usage? If it's just free people
| might use it just to use it-but isn't that kind of the
| point of a demo?
| samaralihussain wrote:
| that's a good point. I've just changed it so you don't
| need to sign up to view a publicly shared itinerary. so
| you can browse through itineraries on the homepage
| without requiring sign up.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Same as the other commenters in that I don't know what we're
| dealing with because I didn't sign up, and I didn't sign up
| because I don't know what it does or if I need it.
|
| Rather than reengineer your site, consider just putting up a
| static walkthrough of key features, or a short video demo.
|
| Cheers!
| samaralihussain wrote:
| so i've now added a page that will route you to view the
| itinerary you clicked on from the main page without requiring
| you to sign up. Hopefully this helps. Sorry for the delay in
| getting this up and running - was working a 12 hour shift, so
| had to wait until after work
| kenrick95 wrote:
| This is really cool. Coincidentally I am currently in the process
| of building one myself (just for personal use), though mine has
| much less features than this one. I hope this I can take some
| inspiration from your site.
|
| 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~
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| You might want to pick a backup domain name -- it seems possible
| .io could disappear in the next several years:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526
| scoot wrote:
| You have a "How can we improve?" button, but nothing happens when
| I click send - perhaps that's one thing you can improve? :)
|
| 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 ;)
| samaralihussain wrote:
| thank you for the feedback - much appreciated. I did in fact
| get your feedback that you submitted. I;ve fixed the UI so it
| reflects that your message was delivered. I've also changed it
| so that clicking on an itinerary will take you to view the
| itinerary without requiring login. Sorry it took a bit of time
| to get back to you - just got home from a 12 hour hospital
| shift and got working on it straight away!
| vzaliva wrote:
| I am a frequent traveller and stuck using TripIt. It has an
| antiquated UI and is not well-supported. That said, the killer
| feature they have is email parsing. Instead of filling the
| endless field of a form to enter my airline ticket or hotel
| reservation, I just forward their the confirmation email, and in
| most cases, they parse it. This is the feature you should
| consider adding.
|
| 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.
| voisin wrote:
| Wouldn't ChatGPT and similar be a perfect use case for parsing
| those emails and outputting in whatever format you'd like?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Will ChatGPT input form data into websites? Your idea is good
| for "turn this ticket info into a .ics file" (I imagine) but
| might not work for "add this ticket info to this proprietary
| website's internal calendar".
| beancookies wrote:
| I assume the point is not to have chatGPT actually perform
| the input.
|
| Instead, it can be used to take various formats and output
| a common structured format that a program can then use to
| do the rest
| vzaliva wrote:
| Correct. From the user's point of view, forward the email
| confirmation and have it added to your itinerary.
| Internally, it could use ChatGPT or anything else to
| parse it and call the import API.
| pragma_x wrote:
| GPT? Probably not. But there are AI products out there that
| can be trained to do that kind of grunt work with text that
| has semi-regular features to it. Amazon Textract is one such
| tool.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Emails don't need OCR and are usually html with
| attachments, not structured pdfs.
|
| If you want to process contracts or business letters...
| Then yes, that'd be a good choice.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. There are things I don't like about TripIt. It's no use
| for planning and I wish it had the option of a calendar style
| output to make gaps and inconsistencies more obvious. The email
| feature that usually works is pretty killer though.
| Navaie wrote:
| You might want to give a shot to Stippl! It aims to simplify
| your travel (planning), and also has document forwarding.
| Doesn't yet do email parsing though.
|
| Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders
| vzaliva wrote:
| Looks good! I will try when you add email parsing feature :)
| It is a pain to input details manually but I like having all
| my information in once place when I travel: confirmation
| numbers, hotel addresses, phone numbers, etc.
|
| 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).
| Navaie wrote:
| Yep, definitely something that's on our wishlist!
| vzaliva wrote:
| After registering it attepts to open https://stippl.io via
| external URL handler which gives me a popup in my Firefox.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| I was just thinking this morning about email as the integration
| interchange, and how TripIt did the best job of this I've seen.
| It is really, really hard to do right but an awesome feature
| IMO. I wondered if this is because I'm old and like email
| though; my kids never use it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, confirmations are essentially always emails. Your kids
| may not care about those but adults pretty much have to.
|
| But yes I do generally like it even if a lot of chit chat,
| appointment reminders, and the like have migrated to
| messaging.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Need to make demo/demo user whose password can't be changed. I'm
| not watching video or signing up to see. I use spreadsheet right
| now for planning and it works well.
| ccozan wrote:
| > We now have a little one coming along and I can't wait to
| adventure as a family.
|
| Just a note: Forget about it. When child is there, wife loses all
| interest in such activities. Been there, done that. I can aford
| holidays everywhere on earth ( ok maybe not Antarctis :) ), but
| no, missus stays home and asks that I just stay home ( we
| actually bought one ) with her and the kids. No holidays, just
| short trips outside city.
| harshaxnim wrote:
| A trip to Antarctica is cheaper than you might have thought.
| ccozan wrote:
| I am interested!
| rexarex wrote:
| It's free if you get a job on a base there!
| seany62 wrote:
| This is not always true. Both my mother and father enjoyed
| taking the kids on adventures
| shafyy wrote:
| Of course, traveling becomes harder when you have a baby, that
| shouldn't come as a suprise to anybody. But I don't like the
| sexist tone in your post.
|
| Also, what makes you think that your situation generalizes to
| the OP?
| ccozan wrote:
| I do not get the downvotes, there is no sexism involved. Woman
| change after having a baby, which is totally normal that they
| become totally risk adverse and very protective. This, a
| holiday to Machu Pitchu is deemed to many unknowns towards the
| baby vs. a short trip to a nearby totally quiet forest.
| npt1234 wrote:
| The sexism is that you think not taking a baby up machu pichu
| is a genetic trait of women rather than a sign of
| intelligence
| Rygian wrote:
| Luckily for everyone involved, he married his own wife, not
| yours.
| sanj wrote:
| Is your globe showing a Mercator projection??
|
| https://xkcd.com/977/
| Madiyan wrote:
| 85907 54751
| s1mpl3 wrote:
| Well done and keep at it.
|
| Here's my 2 cents. This is a very difficult market to crack. On
| one hand you have Pinterest which is littered with individual
| trip guides and most likely your early adopters to generate
| content. However, they are NOT the right consumers to spend money
| on this.
|
| Figure out the right niche in this market, it's very sparse!
|
| Source: I'm the creator of https://trrip.co
| maelito wrote:
| I can't find an example of how a trip plan looks like, without
| creating an account. Did I miss something ?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I'm surprised no one's mentioned Wanderlog yet -- it's great for
| trip planning / getting other people's trips.
|
| With that said, keep building what you're building, it's not the
| same thing!
| rexarex wrote:
| This is really cool. I also had similar frustrations with excel
| on big group trips and made an app called https://avosquado.app
| that is similar but also different.
|
| I like the live save of input. I had some UI issues on mobile web
| but am curious to check it out more on my desktop! What did you
| use as a backend?
| underdeserver wrote:
| Personally I'm just happy that you're performing, not undergoing,
| the surgeries.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Looks pretty neat but the need to sign up/ log in just to see
| other itineraries is an unnecessary barrier in my opinion. I
| haven't signed up yet as I want to see a sample itinerary first.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I've found
| https://roadtrippers.com is quite good.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| wanderlog also promises to find optimal routes, and discovers
| trips from email confirmations
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| You have created a signup form not a joint trip planner. Asking
| users to signup without giving them anything - thank you but no
| samaralihussain wrote:
| not too sure what you mean - the planner is available as soon
| as you log in. Was there something missing for you?
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| Why is it not available as soon as I open the front page?
| First name? Last name? Email? Perhaps add DOB and a phone
| number or some other personal data so that I could the pretty
| please try out your product? What line of thinking is there
| "i'll put everyhing behind a signup wall"?
| samaralihussain wrote:
| Changed it so the itineraries are viewable without
| requiring sign up. Thanks for commenting - hope you're less
| grumpy tomorrow :)
| groby_b wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that a tool that can't explain
| its value prop without a signup is considered a must-skip by a
| lot of folks.
|
| Yeah, it's classic growth hacking. It's also a giant red flag at
| this point.
| samaralihussain wrote:
| changed it now so you don't need to sign up to view an
| itinerary. Hopefully this is an improvement! This project was
| just a challenge I set myself to see what I could create
| alongside my day job - I'm no expert of growth strategies at
| all (in fact I don't have one). I'm learning as I go along. If
| it's coming across as a poor choice of tactic - apologies! More
| than eager to learn from suggestions here :)
| eddyg wrote:
| Like others have mentioned, I want to play around with a tool a
| bit before signing up.
|
| 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/
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