Show HN: Ambulate – Detailed Trip Planning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ambulate – Detailed Trip Planning

ambulate.app

93 points_phnd_57 comments

Ambulate was created because planning hiking trips using spreadsheets and various map solutions got chaotic. I wanted an app to manage and map multi day trip itineraries in the outdoors/backcountry.

Features - Manage itineraries - Add activities and map markers - Add routes (upload GPX or plot by hand on map) - Desktop and mobile

It is free to try (login using Google or create a user). Alternatively the slides on the home page give an idea of the UI.

I'll appreciate any thoughts and feedback you care to share:)

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If anyone needs a good (related) startup idea, here's one for free:

Complex trip planning for professionals, but in a different way from Ambulate - not hiking trips, but transactions across Web sites: I really hate the way how today you cannot "properly" book a flight, hotel, train like you would do it in a SQL transaction

  BEGIN TRANSACTION
    book train
    book flight
    book hotel
  COMMIT;

Only if all three are available and execute the reservation without error do I also want to execute the other ones; that's a prime use case for DB-like transactions, but across Websites. Because no point getting only the flight if I have no-where to stay etc.

This is what booking.com kind of tries to do, but I think it's actually a pretty hard problem not only because of scheduling quirks, but often times stuff being delayed, bad weather, etc. will totally throw a wrench into plans.

It would be nice to book a trip with planned contingencies. So basically, no matter what happens, you'll have something to do. This seems kind of a luxury product though, so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying a premium.

I can't remember if it was booking.com or some other site like travelocity, but I booked a hotel for work in Dublin, I arrived, and they couldn't find my reservation. After about 30 minutes of the desk staff confusingly clicking around on a computer they 'found' it and I was able to check in. This was a modern hotel too. I stopped using those sites and now only book through the hotel's website, even if it costs more.

For years I was traveling for work, 300+ days a year. I used booking.com almost exclusively and never had this problem.

I did however run into an even worse bug on their platform once where my card got billed, but right after the website crashed and a confirmation never was sent. Naturally, this happened when I had little funds myself.

I called customer support and without a booking number they couldn’t do anything, which I naturally never received…

Thankfully, the money was refunded within 24 hours.

Still I use booking.com, I consider it a great service.

They are not perfect, but they do provide value. My wife does not take showers more than once or twice a year; she takes a bath. Usually twice a day. This is a surprisingly difficult piece of information to find on hotel websites. Booking.com will at least tell you if the property has rooms with bathtubs.

I have resorted to making most reservations by phone, rather than Internet, because it’s the only way to be sure. I don’t like it, it wastes my time, but I have a specific person I can call out who flat-out lied to me if I get there and the room has no bathtub. That is usually enough to get the manager to upgrade me to a room that has the one amenity I specifically requested as a condition of booking.

That’s a lot of water!!

My city takes its water from a surface reservoir and empties its treated sewage into the same river. And I live in the southeastern US, so we have plenty of rainfall.

I’m not draining an aquifer. Other than the cost of the treated water, there is no practical limit to use (the city is nowhere nearly large enough to stress the supply). There are golf courses near the river that just filter out the silt and pump it directly onto the courses.

You can't really do it perfectly unless a single site handles all the booking, otherwise you have race conditions, and obviously there's no incentive for airlines, hotels, etc. to give up booking to a third party since they can upsell you on insurance, upgrades, etc.

> and obviously there's no incentive for airlines, hotels, etc. to give up booking to a third party

Airlines, hotels, etc give up booking all the time to third parties. That's what booking.com is.

No, they aren't giving up booking. They are extending booking to a third party. To solve the problem with race conditions (You book the last seat on the airline, I book the last hotel room, and neither one of us can finish the transaction) you have to centralize all the booking in one party, which no one will do because they want to be able to upsell you at checkout.

I rather think what booking.com is really trying to do is to get money from car rental and flight ticket companies for embedding links to their sales.

I mean, it's meant to bring benefit to them, not to the user.

I knew a guy who was a public speaker. He would be engaged to do keynotes at conferences, or talks at big offsite corporate retreats, stuff like that. He would always book two, sometimes three flights to events that he absolutely could not miss, so that if one flight was canceled, he would just take a different one without having to hassle with a rebooking under time pressure.

Packagers do this. V2 is to throw your negotiations agent into the mix… we are going to book all 3 of these, now, but you need to give us a kickback.

It sounds like the difficulty is mostly in the "book train", "book flight", and "book hotel" steps along with the associated rollback actions. Booking.com and Expedia probably have built their moat around aggregating these steps. If anyone works in this industry, I'd love to know if that's not the case.

I’ve been thinking of solving (something slightly more complex than) that with simulated annealing. Getting all those variables to line up is hard. NP hard. My use was setting a couple loose params for vacation (beach, flight <8 hours, flexible dates) and having it find me the full package.

Funny thing is this is already a job when I thought about it. Travel agents used to do this, now it feels like going to a “financial advisor” where they are more interested in selling you the package with a kickback

A solution to this is to book your flight first, then the hotel, as all airlines (that I'm aware of) allow for a full refund within 24 hrs.

a variation of this problem is carrying your shopping cart around. A shopping list that you can buy in place A or B. Also splitting shopping wisely in both.

Not booking, but there are tools can search all the options and give you the links to book by yourself.

I love this idea. It's simple, effective, and the UI is great. The account creation process is such a relief. Editing and saving trips is delightfully fast. A few suggestions:

* When adding an activity (or route), I instinctively look for a button at the buttom that says "Save activity". And possibly one that says "Cancel". Right now it's immediately saved and appears on the itinerary. That might be faster, but it leaves me feeling anxious about state.

* The ability to share a Trip with others and even to allow collaboration would be a game-changer. Might require you to allow people to view/create/edit Trips with a "guest" account.

* It would be amazing if there was a way to automatically generate driving or public transport directions and have the Activity and Route both added into the itinerary.

Thanks for the feedback:)

Currently all changes need to be manually saved by clicking on the blue Save trip button on the top of the itinerary. I'll give it some thought.

Sharing trips is indeed a very cool feature that is high up on the todo list.

Auto generating routes is also a great idea, I'll look into it, cheers!

I'll start with the least important detail but the first one I noticed: the main page features an example image that shows mountains scenery that could have been the foothill of the divide from the south west (based on the combination of the vegetation and peaks), however, the trip planning details are for somewhere in Norway which was very confusing until I checked and saw it was an AI generated image.

But to the more important stuff: the main tools I've been using for trail/route planning (for over 6K miles) are Gaia and CalTopo. These tools have a lot of route building tools and overlays for both planning and navigation and I guess you don't want to replace these tools and if you acknowledge hikers are using these tools already and see a way to complement them somehow, I think you want to let the user directly reference their tracks/routes from within Ambulate as it's unlikely they'd like to replicate their work in another tool.

There are certainly a lot of powerful route building tools out there.

Ambulate supports importing tracks/routes GPX files, such that route planning could be done in e.g. Gaia or CalTopo and then exported as GPX and finally imported to Ambulate.

On a similar note all routes in Ambulate can be exported as GPX, so they can be imported to other tools e.g. navigation apps or GPS devices.

AFAIK neither Gaia or CalTopo have public APIs, but they both seem to support sharing in some form, perhaps it is possible for other applications, like Ambulate, to access routes directly saving the the GPX export/import steps? I'll add this as a issue for further investigation, thanks!

We take trips to Europe every couple of years, usually around a big city with lots of tourist attractions (like Paris / London / etc.); there's a lot of planning involved, sometimes including purchasing tickets using various museum / attraction websites and it's a PITA to keep track of the itinerary and all the e-tickets, timing, etc.

Never found a solution for that particular problem. I tried Wanderlog -which sounds good on paper- but it was too clunky to use. Needs something simple and clean. I like this UI, but it's for a different purpose than going to a city with lots of attractions / museums / restaurants / etc.

Yeah, for adding markers to a city map I think being able to search by address is important. Thanks for sharing.

I need more information on what this can do before I'm willing to create an account.

Just a quick note on your landing page on mobile, if you add the following CSS to the slides img element it'll look a lot better across viewports:

    max-width: 100%;
    object-fit: contain;

Thank you, improvement is deployed to production:)

I get that ambulate just means to walk around but it gives the sense to something medical (as an American).

That was my reaction as well to seeing the name. It makes me think of both ambulance and amputate, which are not good associations.

The usage of the word is reminiscent of ambulatory which has a distinctive medical jargon connotation to my ear.

You need a demo user. I won’t sign up to look at it.

Same. I plan trips in this EXACT way. Annotated maps alongside itinerary, marking what's optional vs mandatory, etc.

You can put in any email address you want. They don't send a verification link.

I signed up with leave.my.personal@data.alone.com

I'm sorry you've not yet tried the plethora of disposable email services

Username: wiwhslhypgtjahnblg@nbmbb.com Password: wiwhslhypgtjahnblg@nbmbb.com

I'll save you the trouble: it's pretty barebones, but I'm guessing it reflects the needs and wants of the author and good for them

Thank you.

How does this compare against something like Wanderlog?

Would be nice to see a little more detail on the individual features on the main page.

Oh and your copyright is out of date.

Are any of these apps open source and available for self hosting? Currently I am using a combination of Google Maps, spreadsheets, Joplin notes, and email to plan my trips. An app that replaces all of that and I can self host would be ideal.

Edit: Additional feature would love to see -- merge the trip plan with photos from the trip and send draft or publish to SSG/blog of choice.

Ambulate is GPLv3, source code at https://github.com/oliverfields/tripplanner2.

It depends on Firebase for authorization and a S3 bucket for storage.

Copy dotenv.local_example to .env.local and add relevant info, then use npm run serve, to run locally.

Nice idea to merge trip plan and photos:)

I tried using wanderlog on a recent 4 month long trip and it became totally unusable after adding maybe 2 months worth of things to it. It has some really baffling UI/UX decisions too, like not showing the address of accommodations, just the name. Really made me feel like no one working on it had ever tried to use it when actually traveling.

They had also gone big on AI slop for recommendations which made it really hard to trust any advice in the lists of things to do.

I think these sort of travel apps are really hard to find an audience for. Very very few people travel often enough to pay a subscription and it is hard to justify spending significant money as a one-off purchase when traveling is already so expensive.

The concepts seem at first glance to be similar, but I think the main difference is that Ambulate emphasizes creating a map that can be used for actual navigation along side the itinerary (plotting routes and adding map markers).

Wanderlog seems to be more about organizing the overall activities, where the travel activities are just points on the itinerary, e.g. get a flight from A to B.

I don't see how I can add a point on this app.

I created https://travelmap.net/itinerary to trace my itineraries.

If you mean Ambulate, just click on the map and choose Add Marker.

Blogpost: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/a-local-first-case-study/

Nice app, I like the free form way of creating an itinerary.

Seems that the main difference is that Ambulate supports manually plotting routes/uploading GPX routes and annotating the map with markers.

Often times in the back country the points you want on the map do not lend themselves to looking up by name.

this space has huge potential . On one end you have Google & Apple maps that are aimed at efficient commutes. On the other hand you have experiencing planning apps like Tripadvisor, All Trails, Instagram which help you brainstorm on all the adventures.

Eventually you get to a point where you need a detailed itinerary of waypoints, maps, resources etc to help guide a multi-week or multi-month trip.

Currently no app supports this space. it's almost overwhelming to juggle 3 mapping apps (google, apple, gaia), multiple adventure apps , google docs, google sheets and try to run a trip .

And having the content all available offline is key. It's the worst experience being somewhere unfamiliar, with a taxi driver houding you, and you don't know where to go.

Ambulate was made to address your needs - a central place to plan a trip.

You are exactly right about offline being key! Routes are downloadable to your devices. A future feature is to export the whole trip itinerary and maps to pdf for offline use.

Darn, I was hoping this was a scooter trip planning app: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5cffMbZV8E0

The guy in the vid says he hates walking, so not the target audience:D

For everyone just having a look, you can create an account with any email to check it out as a demo user, no personal information needs to be shared

Obligatory link: https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-...

Unusable on mobile unfortunately

Works on iOS 17 with Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

What OS and browser where you using?

This is from 2019?

The github repo is:)

I don't think the slides are enough to view the app's features. I don't want to create an account just to see the features. Also the auto-advancing slides don't allow me to look closely at the UI.

I think this needs a non-registered user page. Not feeling to sign up to just have a look.

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