TripVerse: A Simple Travel Planning App

Online travel planning is big business. Online flight bookings, hotel bookings, car rentals, and tour bookings are worth billions of dollars each year. So, there’s a huge race to create the next big travel app.

TripVerse is a travel planning site and application that helps travelers create itineraries for trips of all kinds, from month-long road trips to a single day in a city. As a traveler who has a hard time planning more than one day (or a few hours) ahead of time, this app makes a dreadful process much less painful, despite a bit of the glitchiness that tends to come with early-release apps and software.

How TripVerse Works

TripVerse pulls data from other social networks in order to create the easiest possible experience for the user.

Start by logging onto the website or downloading the app (they have both Android and iOS versions). Of course, to save the time of typing your email and password, you have the option of logging in with your Facebook account as well. Once logged in, you can select your destination and create your own itinerary or browse a number of pre-made itineraries by fellow travelers.

I’m a really fast typist, so I prefer my computer to my phone when doing stuff, so I tried it out by planning a few trips on the desktop version of TripVerse. I’ll list them all later, but if you’d like to see how they look here’s an example.

When you create a trip, you can add up to five locations to it. Under each location you can choose add as many activities as you like. You have the options of simply creating a bucket list of activities for your trip, or organizing the activities by day and time.

You are able to choose activities and destinations from a pre-generated list, in which case TripVerse will automatically pull the address and a photo from FourSquare making the process of adding those activities fast and easy. Of course, you also have the option of adding activities manually.

You can also add private notes to your trips, share your trips with your friends on TripVerse (making group planning much easier), and you can set your trips to public or private.

Once you’re finished, TripVerse displays your activities in order, including times, addresses, and map locations.

Once I finished making a few sample trips I downloaded the TripVerse Android App. It’s possible to plan an entire trip through the mobile app, but I had an easier time making decisions and reading lengthy reviews on the larger screen of my laptop.

The app looks great, though, and is a very nice way to view trips you’ve made, which is good because on the road you’ll be much more likely to be checking your itinerary on your phone than your computer.

What I Liked About TripVerse

Travelers like myself, who usually steer clear of creating any sort of solid itinerary, may think TripVerse is another unnecessary app that will just valuable phone space. However, the app’s usefulness comes into play when you’re trying to figure out what to do and where to go in a city without racking up hefty roaming data charges.

Once the trips are planned and the app is downloaded, travelers can access itineraries and maps without being connected to WiFi. For me, this means less time (and money) is spent popping in and out of restaurants offering “free Wifi” to customers or .

TripVerse is also great way to discover activities in place you’ll visit. You can search TripVerse by location, activity, or tag, and it will show you a list of other people’s public itineraries. Rather than just getting a guidebook description of things to do, you get a rich experience with map locations, photos, and descriptions, which I find very useful.

I think the most useful part of the app, though, is for group planning. I loathe emailing and texting with groups to figure out what people are doing and when. If you have your itinerary loaded into TripVerse, you can just share with your friends and do away with endless group conversations.

What I Didn’t Like

TripVerse is still pretty new, so some bugs are to be expected. There were a few things that I thought could have been better.
First, the locations selection was incomplete in some places. For instance, I wanted to add the town of Kenting to my Taiwan itinerary. However, no matter how hard I tried using different spellings, I couldn’t find it in the app. This seemed odd to me because Kenting is a very popular tourist destination in Taiwan. Many other lesser-known areas also were unavailable.
Second, within the app every destination is prepopulated with recommended activities from FourSquare. This is great, because it makes it fast and easy to add activities without adding all your own information. However, you are only able to browse them by category and scroll through the list. There is no search function, which means that if you’re searching for something specific in a place with lots of activities (think New York or LA) you could be reading through the list for a very long time to find it.

Join Me On TripVerse

I’ve already added five itineraries to TripVerse. They are:

• One Day in Taipei
• Bhutan Bucket List
• Riding the Powder Highway
• Utah Dream Snowboarding Trip
• Best Places in Taiwan

Head on over to TripVerse and add me as a friend. You can find my profile here.

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