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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

haliskerbas 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Experience is quite janky on mobile. Adding a new “task” and the UI elements disappear. I’ll try again on desktop later.
- samaralihussain 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    You will get far with “primarily desktop” in 2024
orangewindies 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.
kenrick95 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526
scoot 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Wouldn’t ChatGPT and similar be a perfect use case for parsing those emails and outputting in whatever format you’d like?
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
    - netsharc 2y ago
      I tried this, but Bing Copilot hallucinated download links for the ICS files for me. When it was doing the gimmicky animated typing it was typing some Markdown-esque URL, but when it finished the line it ended up with just the link title with nothing clickable...
renewiltord 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  A trip to Antarctica is cheaper than you might have thought.
  - ccozan 2y ago
    I am interested!
  - rexarex 2y ago
    It’s free if you get a job on a base there!
- seany62 2y ago
  This is not always true. Both my mother and father enjoyed taking the kids on adventures
- shafyy 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
sanj 2y ago
Is your globe showing a Mercator projection?? https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/
Madiyan 2y ago
85907 54751
s1mpl3 2y ago
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 https://trrip.co
- netsharc 2y ago
  Is there an app that suggest "Popular places near your route" while I'm planning a day? Or not just popular, but spots that've been mentioned in e.g. Lonely Planet, or some travel blog (sourcing the data would be a fascinating engineering exercise). It'd be great if the app recommends a spot, and when the user clicks "Squeeze it in", it would adjust the times accordingly. Or using your example of Tokyo, if I'm booked to see a Sumo match at 2 pm, and there's not enough time beforehand to squeeze it in, the app could even suggest an alternative time. (Hah this is turning to a travelling salesman problem...) Yeah yeah, "popular" equals touristy, but just like Pumpkin Spice Latte in September, maybe I don't mind being a "basic tourist". When Instagram's API was more open, someone did a heatmap of places that are tagged a lot in photos.
maelito 2y ago
I can't find an example of how a trip plan looks like, without creating an account. Did I miss something ?
yawnxyz 2y ago
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 2y ago
This is really cool. I also had similar frustrations with excel on big group trips and made an app called https://avosquado.app 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 2y ago
Personally I'm just happy that you're performing, not undergoing, the surgeries.
Temporary_31337 2y ago
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 2y ago
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I've found https://roadtrippers.com https://roadtrippers.com is quite good.
- ikari_pl 2y ago
  wanderlog also promises to find optimal routes, and discovers trips from email confirmations
gytisgreitai 2y ago
You have created a signup form not a joint trip planner. Asking users to signup without giving them anything - thank you but no
- samaralihussain 2y ago
  not too sure what you mean - the planner is available as soon as you log in. Was there something missing for you?
  - gytisgreitai 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Changed it so the itineraries are viewable without requiring sign up. Thanks for commenting - hope you're less grumpy tomorrow :)
groby_b 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 :)
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Not meant as criticism, my apologies - it's a natural choice for a lot of new sites (because we've all seen the pattern so often). Just meant as a "it might work better if..."
eddyg 2y ago
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/ https://tripsy.app/
NiagaraThistle 2y ago
I love this! I've been building something similar for far too long - and it is far too buggy still - for Europe-only travel. Good luck with this. I know how hard it can be doing this sort of thing between job, life, family, and dreaming of your next trip :)

haliskerbas 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

Experience is quite janky on mobile. Adding a new “task” and the UI elements disappear. I’ll try again on desktop later.

samaralihussain 2y ago
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 2y ago
  You will get far with “primarily desktop” in 2024

orangewindies 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.

kenrick95 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526

scoot 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Wouldn’t ChatGPT and similar be a perfect use case for parsing those emails and outputting in whatever format you’d like?
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    I tried this, but Bing Copilot hallucinated download links for the ICS files for me. When it was doing the gimmicky animated typing it was typing some Markdown-esque URL, but when it finished the line it ended up with just the link title with nothing clickable...

renewiltord 2y ago

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 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
A trip to Antarctica is cheaper than you might have thought.
- ccozan 2y ago
  I am interested!
- rexarex 2y ago
  It’s free if you get a job on a base there!
seany62 2y ago
This is not always true. Both my mother and father enjoyed taking the kids on adventures
shafyy 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.

sanj 2y ago

Is your globe showing a Mercator projection?? https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/

Madiyan 2y ago

85907 54751

s1mpl3 2y ago

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 https://trrip.co

netsharc 2y ago
Is there an app that suggest "Popular places near your route" while I'm planning a day? Or not just popular, but spots that've been mentioned in e.g. Lonely Planet, or some travel blog (sourcing the data would be a fascinating engineering exercise). It'd be great if the app recommends a spot, and when the user clicks "Squeeze it in", it would adjust the times accordingly. Or using your example of Tokyo, if I'm booked to see a Sumo match at 2 pm, and there's not enough time beforehand to squeeze it in, the app could even suggest an alternative time. (Hah this is turning to a travelling salesman problem...) Yeah yeah, "popular" equals touristy, but just like Pumpkin Spice Latte in September, maybe I don't mind being a "basic tourist". When Instagram's API was more open, someone did a heatmap of places that are tagged a lot in photos.

maelito 2y ago

I can't find an example of how a trip plan looks like, without creating an account. Did I miss something ?

yawnxyz 2y ago

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 2y ago

This is really cool. I also had similar frustrations with excel on big group trips and made an app called https://avosquado.app 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 2y ago

Personally I'm just happy that you're performing, not undergoing, the surgeries.

Temporary_31337 2y ago

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 2y ago

Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I've found https://roadtrippers.com https://roadtrippers.com is quite good.

ikari_pl 2y ago
wanderlog also promises to find optimal routes, and discovers trips from email confirmations

gytisgreitai 2y ago

You have created a signup form not a joint trip planner. Asking users to signup without giving them anything - thank you but no

samaralihussain 2y ago
not too sure what you mean - the planner is available as soon as you log in. Was there something missing for you?
- gytisgreitai 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Changed it so the itineraries are viewable without requiring sign up. Thanks for commenting - hope you're less grumpy tomorrow :)

groby_b 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 :)
- groby_b 2y ago
  Not meant as criticism, my apologies - it's a natural choice for a lot of new sites (because we've all seen the pattern so often). Just meant as a "it might work better if..."

eddyg 2y ago

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/ https://tripsy.app/

NiagaraThistle 2y ago

I love this! I've been building something similar for far too long - and it is far too buggy still - for Europe-only travel. Good luck with this. I know how hard it can be doing this sort of thing between job, life, family, and dreaming of your next trip :)