
Launch HN: Travelchime (YC W19) – Doc for travel planning with friends - phsource
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
======
xrd
It's great, I'm doing planning for a trip to Rio next week. I signed up and
gave it a try.

My friend did exactly the same thing you used to do: created a shared Google
doc.

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's early, but your ideas suggested here don't compel
me to jump in and abandon all alternatives.

I'm sure you have your priority list already, but what would make it an easy
switch for me:

Add "day tabs" 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.

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've added with notes about that, with the long term goal of pulling in that
data automatically for me.

Build a schedule for me given the things I'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.

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 "Hey, try Ipanema! Copacabana is for tourists and more dangerous." Or,
"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." (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).

Exciting first steps!

~~~
arciini
Thanks for the suggestions! Smart suggestions is something that I can really
see happening as well.

For the idea of "day tabs" \- we actually used to have a calendar view in the
product, but stripped it out for this format of "lists". Currently, it's
possible to get close to what you want by just naming the place lists: "Day 1"
or "Day 2" \- see
[https://travelchime.com/plan/grayuczaswflzvto](https://travelchime.com/plan/grayuczaswflzvto)

Would this work for you? Or do you like to plan hour-by-hour?

The place suggestions based on what you have make a lot of sense. There are 2
approaches we've considered for that: by doing Netflix-style "users who watch
these movies go to these places", and using crawled data. Basing it off of
user preferences does require a good amount of data and lots of care to ensure
good privacy.

Because of that, I think we'll most likely start by expanding the range of
pre-curated lists. There's tons of content on the web that we'd love to link
out to for specific types of travelers: "best for families" or "best for
adventurous" travelers. We can make that information easy to find and easy to
incorporate into your own plans

~~~
xrd
So, I'm not clear if naming things "Day 1" means I have an easy way to switch
between the days. I don't see a way to do that with the example you shared
(would have been happy to see this information when I visited Kona two months
ago!).

Are you saying that this allows a calendar view somehow? Or, that I can just
organize into a list this way? I don't need the ability to see hour-by-hour
(but having your system schedule things into a day calendar would be amazing).
But, this seems like it does not solve the problem I have with needing to
scroll around and lose context.

------
yingw787
Wow, this is really cool! I built something kind of similar after college as a
proof-of-concept and to learn JavaScript/React:
[https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/](https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/)

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's really important.

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 "knowing the terrain" or something, though I don't know for
sure. If you could get that audience (older, wealthier couples, I'm guessing)
and convince them to pay for this platform instead, you could earn a pretty
penny. That probably falls under the "do things that don't scale" category of
manually tailoring travel plans.

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 :)

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 :)

~~~
arciini
Traveltile looks really cool! The documentation is kinda amazing and I'll
definitely clone it and play with it later today.

Before Travelchime, Peter and I had some experience with monetizing via hotel
and flight affiliate fees via our past sites,
[https://bookwithmatrix.com](https://bookwithmatrix.com) and
[https://alltheflightdeals.com](https://alltheflightdeals.com) . We did a bit
of research, and about 2/3 of travelers who use docs start one before they
book the hotels. We believe that if our recommendations are good enough (based
on where you'd like to go in a trip plan), we could monetize using the same
model there.

Forking an existing trip plan and copying bits/pieces from friends' trip plans
are both features we'd really like to build out really soon! So many of my
trips end up having 50%+ overlap with some of my friends, so that'd save a ton
of time

~~~
notoriousjpg
Wow you guys have a lot of experience in this space! For a product like
alltheflightdeals, i've never understood how entrepreneurs justify competing
here. I assume you're not directly integrating with a GDS and that this works
off Skyscanner API (or equiv)? Did you see much traction with ATFD? Is there a
vision in the future to combine travelchime with ATFD? Seems like they would
work well together :)

Great job btw!

------
avitzurel
I spent a good chunk of the last 10 years in a travel startup that targeted
consumers.

I am unsure of the business model here but I can only imagine it's a pay-per-
click from the big OTAs, mainly for hotels.

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.

This leaves a startup like this in a tough spot, how do you acquire users?

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's absolutely an uphill
battle to scale that up.

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.

If you don't mind sharing, what is the revenue model for TravelChime?

~~~
arciini
We plan on making money via affiliate links to start with! It's a model we're
familiar with in our past projects.

Having worked in travel for a while now, we realize that paid marketing is
incredibly competitive. Based on that understanding, we've actually never
spent a single cent for paid marketing on our previous projects.

For growth: We want to just provide a really good central tool for people to
plan their trips, and an easy way for those people to share plans with their
friends. We think travel is inherently social, and that's something we want to
do well (while respecting privacy).

------
ivyirwin
Congrats on the launch! You have a great start to a tough problem. I've been
running a collaborative travel planning and booking platform for over two
years – it's an exciting space and there's still a lot of opportunity in the
multi-person planning space.

Some feedback on the product:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Some business feedback (for what it'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'd be happy to talk about what has worked for us
if you're interested – email is in profile. For those interested, my company
launched [https://www.lunamoons.com](https://www.lunamoons.com) as a B2C
collaborative planner but we recently pivoted to a full service platform
(think squarespace for travel agents) which is live at
[https://www.trips.app](https://www.trips.app). We tout our trips as google
docs for itineraries, but maybe less doc like (i.e.
[https://sample.trips.app/sample-itinerary/rapid-
flower-8635/...](https://sample.trips.app/sample-itinerary/rapid-
flower-8635/invite/ae8a8a295f354f2ca047da29e58e4376/))

~~~
phsource
Thanks for trying it out in such detail!

> 2\. Input validation needed for links

We just fixed this; thanks for the report!

> 3\. Is it possible to scope searches?

I just added search scoping based on the current map viewport; thanks for the
suggestion! I've been meaning to do this for a while.

> 4\. Default map zoom is inconsistent.

I also just pushed a fix that zooms in if the newly-created marker is too
close to another one. Take a look and see if it works!

The other issues will take a bit longer, but they're all definitely real:

1\. We have issues with editors editing text at the same time, and this is an
ongoing limitation of how we're using ShareDB on the back-end. We'll do our
best to make it better

5\. We definitely should add bubbles to show who else is editing for sure!
You're not missing anything -- we really need to do this

On the overall business feedback part, it's definitely tough. We've had some
success with affiliate ads for our other sites, but otherwise, B2B is a much
easier market in many ways. We're going to build the best product we can, and
keep costs low.

On the travel agents side, one name you've probably heard of is Travefy! (They
similarly pivoted from a B2C to B2B) Take a look, and feel free to give me an
email if you'd like to be introduced to a Travefy early-user travel agent to
learn what she likes about it (peter@travelchime.com)

~~~
expliced
What kinds of limitations do you have with sharedb? How do you use it? I've
recently started using it in a project and would like to know the limitations.

------
keerthiko
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.

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're all stuck with Google Spreadsheets
with stuff scattered all over the place.

Some things I love so far with Travelchime:

\- not assuming too many things about how i want to organize (not forcing a
calendar, or map pins, etc)

\- the entity recognition is fabulously implemented and feels great, excellent
usage

\- the space dedicated to the map, suggestions, empty fields is perfect

\- the dynamic map focusing on what i've entered so far is great

Some suggestions:

\- add a checklist per traveler, which anyone can add stuff to (like assigning
tasks): so each traveler can see everyone else's progress on things like

[ ] apply for visa

[ ] buy tickets

[ ] pack luggage

[ ] reservation at fancy restaurant

\- 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's important to do this right so that the whole thing doesn't
have to be shoehorned into a calendar

\- ownership of events by an individual or subgroup that doesn'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

Feel free to PM if you want to discuss the product more, I love this space and
have many thoughts :)

~~~
arciini
Thanks for the comprehensive list! A lot of planning tools assume you want a
minute-by-minute plan, but we talked to a lot of friends and strangers and
quickly realized that the range of planning people do is huge, and our current
"place list" format is made to be compatible for a good range of people.

You're definitely not the only one who's requested a checklist, so we're
looking into prioritizing that.

We've thought about a more calendar-focused view, where users can explicitly
annotate: "this section represents a day" or "this event has a specific time"
and would show up on the calendar. I can try to mock something up and see what
you think.

I've bookmarked your profile page and we'll definitely reach out within the
next week!

------
Existenceblinks
Most comments are positive here. That's unexpected or it's just because it's
from YC, not sure.

We had discussions here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658)
and here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10923143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10923143)
before.

This looks like a bit of planning and a bit of organizing plans (like Tripit).

I like that it's more like an organizing tools. I also had sort of this idea
..

~~~
arciini
I've personally read both of those articles before, and especially like the
one by the founder of Desti. That inspired a lot of chats between me, my
cofounder, my friends, and our users

There are 3 main issues raised:

\- Getting users to learn a new tool is super-hard since users are used to
being able to do anything and have custom workflows. That's why they use
Google Docs or Word or Google Sheets

\- Monetization with affiliates is OK, but you are in some ways competing with
your customers (the OTAs), and they're still making more money and can
outspend you on marketing

\- Acquiring users is hard since users don't travel often, and the typical
channels for infrequently-used product growth (SEO, SEM) are super-competitive

We really try hard to solve the first problem by not being prescriptive about
how you use Travelchime. We try very hard to let users do whatever they might
want to do in a Google Doc or Google Maps. Unlike many travel planners we've
tried, we don't assume you like to plan minute-to-minute or by referring to a
single resource. We've had hours of face-to-face chats with tens of users and
we're not trying to flip the way they plan travel, but rather complement the
way they plan travel.

For monetization, we have some ideas around it but aren't sure enough of them
to share right now.

We also believe the user acquisition door isn't as closed as it seems. First,
we're hooking onto a growing trend of travel being social. Most people we
talked to have asked friends or family for travel tips, and we want to make
planning based on that easy. Second, we've done this before, and while we know
SEO is tough, Peter and I have built a profitable (albeit fairly niche)
business in the field on top of SEO before.

I might be a bit deluded about this, but I'm OK with it!

~~~
Existenceblinks
> That's why they use Google Docs or Word or Google Sheets

True, planning content itself is already annoying. I had an idea on UX, it
needs to be as easy as using Spreadsheet cells but better visualization (a
simple cute linked list like metro train chart maybe). Pick those common
columns and visualize it nicely. Try not to complicate it more.

> Monetization with affiliates is OK

I personally do not like any form of ads, so it's bad for me. I was thinking
about selling this data organizing to travel agencies, they already have all
content. Let them create nicer packages (easier to understand itinerary).
Maybe they can sell that for people who want to go by themselves. $3 per
itinerary (can export to pdf, make it pretty when printed, so no needs phone
battery all the time)

\- Acquiring users is hard since users don't travel often, and the typical
channels for infrequently-used product growth

This is uncertain, I'm not really sure it's problem. Actually I don't think it
will be a problem but fear it would

I think you already did an intensive analysis so good luck!

------
daveambrose
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.

Looking forward to trying this out and playing around w. the export feature
for Maps.

------
johnnyg
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:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/168383](https://support.google.com/a/answer/168383)

so I'll post my feedback to HN:

Likes

1\. Good idea. My wife and I are going to <place X> soon. Scratched an itch.

2\. The "share" link was easy but you should have asked me for her email to
build the network.

3\. The adding of categories of things was intuitive and easy.

Dislikes

1\. When searching for the place the search term I typed in didn'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.

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.

~~~
arciini
Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to email us at harry@travelchime.com or
peter@travelchime.com if you have trouble in the future.

We've also noticed the text being inconsistent. It's especially bad for
foreign places. We've added it to our bug-list!

The itinerary inspiration lists honestly are kinda similar to the place list
you create. For the place list you create, you can click on a place to see
more info and links out. We'd like to merge the behaviour for those so it
isn't confusing, but that's also in the pipeline. Sorry about that!

------
underyx
Wow, this looks awesome! I work at Kiwi.com and I hope you don'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 (:

------
notoriousjpg
Very cool. I'm just using My Maps from Google at the moment so this is better.

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's
compared to something which feels completely automated and lacking a human
touch (eg inspirock, routeperfect).

Any plans to license this out for other travel startups to integrate into
their own products?

~~~
arciini
The set of pre-seeded itineraries were manually reviewed by us and a team of
contractors for quality! We have automated a good part of the pipeline, but
not all of it.

We'd definitely be open to licensing this out to other travel
companies/startups, so do contact me at harry@travelchime.com if you know
anyone who's interested

------
awestroke
This is something I have been searching for many times. Will definitely try it
out for my coming trips and recommend it to friends.

------
charleyma
This is amazing!!

Love that you all have also pre-seeded itineraries from popular travel blogs -
any plans on also bringing in tripadvisor data in?

~~~
phsource
We have them (for some cities)! Check out
[https://travelchime.com/plan/peelkusfqahdnjxk/list/2987](https://travelchime.com/plan/peelkusfqahdnjxk/list/2987)
(they're one of the lists that show up at the top of the page)

------
cl3m
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
[https://www.google.com/mymaps](https://www.google.com/mymaps)

------
z0han
Congratulations to you and team on this launch!

I'm writing in to report an issue, please have it looked into - the Facebook
signup is not working. It returned an "unknown error" to me. And you guys have
placed it right up top. I then signed up with Google, and that worked fine. :)

Good luck

~~~
arciini
Earlier today, we saw a lot of errors with the Facebook outage. We think it's
fixed, but we'll take a look!

------
shay_ker
I've used Basecamp's Trix Editor for a lot of out-of-the-box functionality:

[https://trix-editor.org/](https://trix-editor.org/)

It's very easy to re-style it and extend it. I use it in a React app and it's
been a delight.

~~~
arciini
Cool! What do you like about it?

QuillJS has been working well enough for us as an editor! It supports the
collaborative editing we need, as well as mobile.

I could write a whole essay on our whole decision-making on contenteditable
controls. The short answer is SlateJS could be great, but didn't work well on
mobile yet. DraftJS is kinda abandoned by Facebook, and Quill isn't native to
React but still works well, so we used it.

Here's an older post I made on this subject
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18998042#19000425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18998042#19000425)

~~~
shay_ker
Yeah I found similar things. I think at some point I'd want to move to
something like Quill when I want to build out a more complicated editor, but
for now Trix just worked with little configuration. It was pretty easy to
extend, works well on mobile, and the creators are fairly responsive.

Good to know that you've had a good experience with Quill!

------
gaara87
This comes in perfect time for my Europe trip planning with 3 friends from
around the world!

------
pard68
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

------
ajroot
Great idea. I love it!

Would it make sense to integrate the financial aspects of a trip? Maybe
something like splitwise for splitting the expenses post trip.

------
cphoover
How does this compare with:

[https://get.google.com/trips/](https://get.google.com/trips/)

~~~
gaara87
Travelchime is collaborative, which google trips is not

------
nsx147
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

~~~
arciini
We're interested in building this out, especially with the launch of a
standalone mobile app (unlike the web-app that we have here).

How do you currently aggregate/split costs for the trip? Do you just use a
spreadsheet?

------
MarkMyWordsMan
Probably wanna hide LogRocket from console.log()

