Comment by travocado | Hacker News Reader

Comment by travocado | Hacker News Reader

Travocado simplifies planning the logistics of your group camping trip.

- Send invites and collect rsvps.

- Coordinate rides and carpooling.

- Create lists of supplies and figure out who's bringing what.

- Plan meals and schedule of activities.

- Submit expenses and calculate how much each person owes.

- Chat real-time or offline with other trip members.

- Receive regular email updates on the progress of planning and your own personal to-do list.

- Works for camping trips, Coachella, Burning Man, any type of coordinated group trip!

I'm a solo developer/designer/entrepreneur and this started out as a learning project so I could learn node, react, postgres, isomorphic rendering. It turned out to be a solid idea so I quit my job and have been working on this full-time for the last few months.

We just came out of private beta and now looking for a wider audience to give us feedback and help guide us to be the trip planning tool you've always wanted! (I'm not a designer by trade so I'd love feedback if the UI is confusing anywhere.)

Interesting problem space, for me it's in most cases a combination of Etherpad or a wiki, google spreadsheets and some file storage and group chat. Up to now, your solution IMHO mostly solves the parts spreadsheets is used for. Sadly no directly upcoming trips for me, or I'd give it a spin. Do you have a blog or twitter account where I could follow updates?

Things I'd be missing for some trips:

- mapping/planning of multi-place trips, and of places for activities (e.g. for a city trip)

- a "scratch" space for collecting ideas. I don't entirely see yet how one might get from "We want to go to Scotland" to "this is our itinerary and finished plan" inside the tool.

- the supplies area needs amounts

ideas:

- maybe I missed it, but generating a pack list would be great

- a way to collect files, or to integrate with other solutions for that (maybe allow linking to dropbox or something, if you (understandably) don't want to host tons of files yourself?). For tickets, booking confirmations, ...

- some way to do trip documentation, or at least to collect that afterwards (logs/"reports", pictures, maybe social media integration, ...)

Thanks for the feedback! It's definitely early and we definitely plan on expanding to cover more types of trips, like road trips and bachelor parties and vacations, but for beta we wanted to keep it simple and stick to camping. I eventually want to make it like a group tripit, tracking flights, hotels, and rental cars, etc (not to mention make it more user friendly than tripit)

All your bullet points have been added to our backlog. Eventually I'll add a mobile app which will definitely include a packing list.

Integrating with Facebook and Dropbox and other storage providers is also on our list.

I figured the Discussion box was a good enough "scratch space" for trip members to discuss ideas for things to do, then when you decide on an activity, you could formally add it in the Schedule tab.

Thanks again for the feedback!

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