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Launch HN: Travelchime (YC W19) – Doc for travel planning with friends

108 pointsby phsourceabout 6 years ago
We&#x27;re Peter and Harry, and we&#x27;re building Travelchime (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travelchime.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travelchime.com</a>).<p>Travelchime is like Google Docs for planning vacation travel with your friends&#x27; recommendations. It lets you add places and attractions you&#x27;re looking to visit to a doc, export them to Google Maps, and collaborate with your friends who&#x27;ve been there or are going there with you.<p>We used to plan our trips using Google Docs and Sheets, but it was a pain. We&#x27;d write the documents, then had to add the same places to a map for when we&#x27;re on the trip. We also often sent these out to friends who asked -- there&#x27;s nobody whose recommendations you trust more than your friends -- but it&#x27;s hard to find which friends have these docs.<p>We built Travelchime to solve this. With Travelchime, you can:<p>1. Add all the museums, restaurants, and places you&#x27;re staying&#x2F;want to visit to a doc on Travelchime, and see them on a map with their opening times, links to Yelp, and more<p>2. Share the doc with friends on the trip or ask others for recommendations: multiple people can edit&#x2F;suggest at the same time, just like Google Docs [1]<p>3. Export the places to Google Maps for when you&#x27;re on the go<p>4. (Optional) Read some itineraries from around the web to get inspired! We use basic machine learning [2] to parse itineraries for the places they mention to help get you started<p>5. Once you’ve gone on the trip, you can share the full itinerary with notes to inspire your friends<p>We haven’t monetized, but will eventually link out to hotels that work well with your itinerary and get affiliate commissions there.<p>We&#x27;ve gotten a ton of support from Hacker News in the past: when Yale shut down our courses website, Hacker News rallied and got the attention on it to save it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7060261" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7060261</a>), and past HN launches (e.g., for WrapAPI: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11423070" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11423070</a>) got us our first paying customers. We love the direct feedback we get, so if you&#x27;re planning a trip soon, give it a shot and let us know what you think either here or by email at peter@travelchime.com!<p>[1] To enable real-time editing, we use Quill (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quilljs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quilljs.com&#x2F;</a>) and ShareDB (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;sharedb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;sharedb</a>), both amazing projects. We had also tried Draft.js, Slate, so if you want to chat text editing hit us up!<p>[2] A combination of Google&#x27;s Entity Recognition API, Google Maps&#x27; APIs, and human checkers<p>[3] For those curious: we &lt;3 React and have an all-Javascript stack with Node.js and MySQL on the back-end

21 comments

xrdabout 6 years ago
It&#x27;s great, I&#x27;m doing planning for a trip to Rio next week. I signed up and gave it a try.<p>My friend did exactly the same thing you used to do: created a shared Google doc.<p>At this point, I am not sure I would trade your implementation for doing it in Google Docs. Only because it is one more tool to use and manage and I know the warts of docs already. It&#x27;s early, but your ideas suggested here don&#x27;t compel me to jump in and abandon all alternatives.<p>I&#x27;m sure you have your priority list already, but what would make it an easy switch for me:<p>Add &quot;day tabs&quot; so I can plan things out by the day and easily see whatever day I want. For example, my friend has a daily itinerary which is hard to read and requires scrolling.<p>Filtering for things appropriate for kids, etc. This requires you knowing that data, but maybe you could focus on at least allowing me to annotate the data I&#x27;ve added with notes about that, with the long term goal of pulling in that data automatically for me.<p>Build a schedule for me given the things I&#x27;m interested in. This would be killer. We added a bunch of items to our Google Doc and figuring out the order in which we want to do things is going to be a lot of work and editing.<p>Could you suggest items that are similar when I add something? If I am putting in Copacabana (and have added kid friendly things) it would be awesome to suggest &quot;Hey, try Ipanema! Copacabana is for tourists and more dangerous.&quot; Or, &quot;If you are going to Sugar Loaf, consider walking around Urca. It is a safe neighborhood because it has a military base right there, and has historic art deco buildings.&quot; (I obviously know about Rio, but traveling there with kids for the first time has shifted my priorities and this kind of information would be supremely helpful).<p>Exciting first steps!
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yingw787about 6 years ago
Wow, this is really cool! I built something kind of similar after college as a proof-of-concept and to learn JavaScript&#x2F;React: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yingw787.github.io&#x2F;traveltile_docs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yingw787.github.io&#x2F;traveltile_docs&#x2F;</a><p>I worried about the monetization model, since my expected audience would be people like me (post-college people starting off). Do you have plans to find paying, high-margin customers? I would say that&#x27;s really important.<p>I supposed that my competition would be sites like TripAdvisor that would sell pre-packaged travel plans to small groups. I would guess it would be because they skim a fee on top, they have liability insurance, or management got talking into them &quot;knowing the terrain&quot; or something, though I don&#x27;t know for sure. If you could get that audience (older, wealthier couples, I&#x27;m guessing) and convince them to pay for this platform instead, you could earn a pretty penny. That probably falls under the &quot;do things that don&#x27;t scale&quot; category of manually tailoring travel plans.<p>Another thing I considered was the ability to fork an existing travel plan, to tailor to changing environments yet retain the benefits of past experience. Since you never really go on the same trip once, but everybody pretty much goes on the same trip. So all the travel plans would go into a data lake, with certain groups pulling, forking, and contributing back. I did not have the technical expertise to do this at the time. Something to consider :)<p>I wish you the very best of luck, I kind of wish I did what you guys are doing today. I will live vicariously through you :)
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avitzurelabout 6 years ago
I spent a good chunk of the last 10 years in a travel startup that targeted consumers.<p>I am unsure of the business model here but I can only imagine it&#x27;s a pay-per-click from the big OTAs, mainly for hotels.<p>The main problem with consumer travel is the fierce competition you are facing, Google is absolutely annihilating the search results in their favor, disgustingly so in the US and even worse in US on mobile.<p>This leaves a startup like this in a tough spot, how do you acquire users?<p>If you think about paying for them, you are in for a world of hurt, you can spend 1.8$ to get .8$ back for a hotel booking and it&#x27;s absolutely an uphill battle to scale that up.<p>I searched the name on Google and I saw the HN page, you two seem to have built a travel business before, you likely know a lot of the difficulties, but in my experience, trip planning scaling is a lot harder than what it seems, especially if you want to monetize it.<p>If you don&#x27;t mind sharing, what is the revenue model for TravelChime?
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ivyirwinabout 6 years ago
Congrats on the launch! You have a great start to a tough problem. I&#x27;ve been running a collaborative travel planning and booking platform for over two years – it&#x27;s an exciting space and there&#x27;s still a lot of opportunity in the multi-person planning space.<p>Some feedback on the product:<p>1. Collaborative features seem a little buggy. I registered and then shared the trip with myself in an incognito window. It was easy to trip up the document sync – try to make an edit in incognito and then make an edit to the same element in the registered window and the document gets out sync.<p>2. Input validation needed for links. I entered an incomplete link (google.com) and it treated it like a relative link, which broke the trip.<p>3. Is it possible to scope searches? I searched for hotels in a city and the initial results seemed centered on my destination but the rest of the list was from other cities or states.<p>4. Default map zoom is inconsistent. I started adding locations but all of the pins were on top of each other at the initial zoom level. Managing zoom level as the itinerary fills out will help keep the trip in perspective.<p>5. I could see edits made in different windows, but was unable to see who was online? Is that part of the UI and I missed it?<p>Some business feedback (for what it&#x27;s worth) – figure out a monetization strategy fast. There are a lot of planners in the travel space but not a lot of booking solutions for groups. Affiliate links are okay but still leave a lot of money on the table. I&#x27;d be happy to talk about what has worked for us if you&#x27;re interested – email is in profile. For those interested, my company launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lunamoons.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lunamoons.com</a> as a B2C collaborative planner but we recently pivoted to a full service platform (think squarespace for travel agents) which is live at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trips.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trips.app</a>. We tout our trips as google docs for itineraries, but maybe less doc like (i.e. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sample.trips.app&#x2F;sample-itinerary&#x2F;rapid-flower-8635&#x2F;invite&#x2F;ae8a8a295f354f2ca047da29e58e4376&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sample.trips.app&#x2F;sample-itinerary&#x2F;rapid-flower-8635&#x2F;...</a>)
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keerthikoabout 6 years ago
Nice. This is a space that has long needed some players. I travel a decent bit because of my remote job (and friends all over the planet), and except for a few long-time travel buddies, I find traveling with others frustrating because they are either over-planners or flaky and hard to coordinate with.<p>The conflicts of interest across all the traditional providers (airbnb, hoteliers, flight providers, credit card companies) left this space packed with dark patterns by default too, so we&#x27;re all stuck with Google Spreadsheets with stuff scattered all over the place.<p>Some things I love so far with Travelchime:<p>- not assuming too many things about how i want to organize (not forcing a calendar, or map pins, etc)<p>- the entity recognition is fabulously implemented and feels great, excellent usage<p>- the space dedicated to the map, suggestions, empty fields is perfect<p>- the dynamic map focusing on what i&#x27;ve entered so far is great<p>Some suggestions:<p>- add a checklist per traveler, which anyone can add stuff to (like assigning tasks): so each traveler can see everyone else&#x27;s progress on things like<p>[ ] apply for visa<p>[ ] buy tickets<p>[ ] pack luggage<p>[ ] reservation at fancy restaurant<p>- while the flexibility of not depending on a calendar is nice, having a calendar to annotate would be nice too, where we can drag in stuff from the other fields. It&#x27;s important to do this right so that the whole thing doesn&#x27;t have to be shoehorned into a calendar<p>- ownership of events by an individual or subgroup that doesn&#x27;t have to involve the entire group (a couple from a larger friend group wants to go for a private date) that they can mark off on said calendar<p>Feel free to PM if you want to discuss the product more, I love this space and have many thoughts :)
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Existenceblinksabout 6 years ago
Most comments are positive here. That&#x27;s unexpected or it&#x27;s just because it&#x27;s from YC, not sure.<p>We had discussions here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8419658</a> and here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10923143" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10923143</a> before.<p>This looks like a bit of planning and a bit of organizing plans (like Tripit).<p>I like that it&#x27;s more like an organizing tools. I also had sort of this idea ..
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daveambroseabout 6 years ago
I always thought the best travel planning app was an email that contained links of places to travel to. The email would go into a Word doc or Google Doc and then get printed to share amongst friends. This is a neat evolution of the same behavior (which is something I’ve always struggled w. evaluating companies in this space, esp. as each person travels very differently). Everyone uses the same plain text editor to plan.<p>Looking forward to trying this out and playing around w. the export feature for Maps.
johnnygabout 6 years ago
Your email to group admin@myrtlelime.com was rejected due to spam classification. The owner of the group can choose to enable message moderation instead of bouncing these emails. More information can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;answer&#x2F;168383" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;answer&#x2F;168383</a><p>so I&#x27;ll post my feedback to HN:<p>Likes<p>1. Good idea. My wife and I are going to &lt;place X&gt; soon. Scratched an itch.<p>2. The &quot;share&quot; link was easy but you should have asked me for her email to build the network.<p>3. The adding of categories of things was intuitive and easy.<p>Dislikes<p>1. When searching for the place the search term I typed in didn&#x27;t change into the data that populated with my search. I did it again to make sure I did it right. Update the text box with the full format name airline style.<p>2. The itinerary inspirations provided lists of things to see and do (good) but no reviews and no way to click for more outside your site. I popped another google tab to copy and paste.
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underyxabout 6 years ago
Wow, this looks awesome! I work at Kiwi.com and I hope you don&#x27;t mind that I passed your site to our business development guys, as I feel like you might consider a partnership to be a good way to monetize (:
notoriousjpgabout 6 years ago
Very cool. I&#x27;m just using My Maps from Google at the moment so this is better.<p>One question: Did you manually populate your pre seeded itineraries or did you parse it automatically? I think they add a lot of credibility to the iti&#x27;s compared to something which feels completely automated and lacking a human touch (eg inspirock, routeperfect).<p>Any plans to license this out for other travel startups to integrate into their own products?
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awestrokeabout 6 years ago
This is something I have been searching for many times. Will definitely try it out for my coming trips and recommend it to friends.
charleymaabout 6 years ago
This is amazing!!<p>Love that you all have also pre-seeded itineraries from popular travel blogs - any plans on also bringing in tripadvisor data in?
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cl3mabout 6 years ago
It is nice but I still find My Maps better. It was always a better tool than Google Sheets but I guess many people do not know about it. You should try at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;mymaps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;mymaps</a>
z0hanabout 6 years ago
Congratulations to you and team on this launch!<p>I&#x27;m writing in to report an issue, please have it looked into - the Facebook signup is not working. It returned an &quot;unknown error&quot; to me. And you guys have placed it right up top. I then signed up with Google, and that worked fine. :)<p>Good luck
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shay_kerabout 6 years ago
I&#x27;ve used Basecamp&#x27;s Trix Editor for a lot of out-of-the-box functionality:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trix-editor.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trix-editor.org&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s very easy to re-style it and extend it. I use it in a React app and it&#x27;s been a delight.
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gaara87about 6 years ago
This comes in perfect time for my Europe trip planning with 3 friends from around the world!
pard68about 6 years ago
Planning a road trip from east coast to west coast and back (USA) with my wife this summer. I will give this a shot and let you know how it goes, thanks
ajrootabout 6 years ago
Great idea. I love it!<p>Would it make sense to integrate the financial aspects of a trip? Maybe something like splitwise for splitting the expenses post trip.
cphooverabout 6 years ago
How does this compare with:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.google.com&#x2F;trips&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.google.com&#x2F;trips&#x2F;</a>
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nsx147about 6 years ago
There is definitely something here. It would be nice to have a service aggregate and split costs for the whole trip. And help planning it
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MarkMyWordsManabout 6 years ago
Probably wanna hide LogRocket from console.log()