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Show HN: Turas.app for Collaborative Trip Planning (turas.app)

3 points by CharlieDigital ↗ HN
Over the New Year weekend, I was planning a trip with my wife on Google Docs and it became really frustrating trying to move days and activities around and figuring out which days we needed which hotels and trying to see which order of days/activities worked best for what we wanted to do. So I did what any weekend hacker does and ended up coding something.

Turas lets you:

  - Collaboratively organize and plan your trips and easily reorganize days and places on your itinerary
  
  - Quickly visualize how changing the start date changes the structure of your trip
  
  - Visualize routes and paths between places on your itinerary and quickly load into Google Maps on the go
  
  - Organize your checklists - packing list, pre-departure, and more
  
  - Generate a text trip summary - perfect for sending in emails and text messages
  
  - Create an inspiration board to capture your notes and ideas as you plan your adventure
If you'd like to see a short intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFx5fJUR53I

I admit, I ended up "rage building" Turas.app over that weekend out of frustration with Google Docs so I did not look into other options like Wanderlog; I just knew what my wife and I needed based on how we organize our multi-day trips.

Would love to get HN's feedback!

4 comments

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Leftium
Nice app! The anonymous login and sample trip are a nice touch. Turas.app may have helped plan my trip to Patagonia with friends.

I ended up writing my own app because my taskpaper trip notes (shared via dropbox) were impossible to view in a nice way from my friend's computer:

https://plaintext-press.leftium.com/https://www.dropbox.com/...

These are real notes from a trip I successfully planned (with sensitive info like passport numbers stripped out). I hope they help in the development of your app~

Note my friends and I had very different trip-planning styles. I like to plan about 2 major activities per day in advance (plus lodging, food, and transportation). I let my friend plan our day in Buenos Aires, which consisted of doing research after we arrived at our hotel, then hitting several tourist sites for a short time each.

CharlieDigital
Thanks for sharing your notes; I love to see how others think and organize information!

Definitely have some ideas like budgeting and tagging (your "@"?).

How do you feel about the more free-form style versus a more structured style Turas? Do you think Turas should have some features which are less structured?

Leftium
The tags are borrowed from the taskpaper format. I didn't utilize it here, but tags can also have values like @due(2023-01-17)

I think most users would prefer a more structured graphical view, especially on mobile. But having a less structured text mode would be nice.

I personally prefer working (mostly) in plain text, then rendering graphical views of the text. Plaintext-press is a view that formats, linkifies and filters the original text file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1g5qrmfinno8a5j/patagonia.taskpape...

I envision other views like a calendar view or even a map view.

The reason I prefer plain text is because I find it faster if I can just use the keyboard without clicking/dragging etc. Search, copy-paste, etc are easier, too. And you can use your favorite text editor (like Vim).

Although I did all the planning in text, I actually also had folders of non-text files where I saved pdf/png files of tickets, receipts, order confirmations, scans, etc.