Introducing Trips

At Lonely Planet, we love finding ways to help people explore the world every day. In fact, it’s our mission. And our brand new mobile app helps you do just that. Meet Trips by Lonely Planet — now available for iOS on the App Store.

Lonely Planet
Aug 8, 2017 · 5 min read

By Brad Haynes

We’ve always been incredibly proud of Lonely Planet’s community of travelers. Just dip into our Thorn Tree Forum — now 21 years young — to see why. From cross-continent drives to eco-friendly volunteering, family travel to city trips, Lonely Planet’s travel community are sharing fascinating, wanderlust-inducing stories on a daily basis.

These shared experiences can be extremely useful for other travelers: they help others understand how accessible certain places are and learn about different people and cultures — and they encourage everyone to celebrate our wonderfully diverse planet.

We wanted to create another way to navigate and showcase this valuable information from real travelers. The idea behind Trips was to provide not only a great way to create and share travel stories but also to highlight the best of that content, helping users discover inspiring, engaging, exciting tales from the road.

You can do three things in the app: get inspired, share, and discover.

Get inspired

Travel vicariously through the experiences of people around the world.

Whether it’s setting sail for Antarctica, road tripping through Oman, or wintering in Cappadocia, people get inspired when learning about the adventures of others. It gives us a sense that the world is just a little bit more accessible, and might even teach us about places we didn’t yet know existed. Who knew there were crystal clear swimming waters in Oman!?

Share your trips

Create beautiful trips to share with family and friends.

Lonely Planet has always been a source of great travel content. After over 44 years, it’s something the company has gotten down to a science. The question for us then became, ‘How do we enable our community to do that for each other?’

So now, for the first time, we’re giving you the controls to publish great travel experiences. That might mean sharing a trip privately with your family and friends, or it could mean publishing something polished for the world to see. Trips by Lonely Planet supports both of these needs.

When you select photos from your Photo Library, Trips uses the time and location data from your photos to generate a beautiful story layout that you may either share immediately or continue to edit. Additional tools allow you to change the cover photo, modify the place and day count of the trip, add or edit your title and subtitle, modify the map, and add more photography, video, and written content. When you’re done, you simply publish and share with the people that you want to see it.

Discover the best

Find great trips and top travelers.

Everyone plans travel differently. So it seemed extra important to allow people to discover content by interest type, to better fit how people think about planning trips. We’re launching with several inspiration categories and are curating the best stuff to each group.

Feature guidelines

If you want to be featured by Lonely Planet, here are some top tips on what makes a trip stand out for our content team. We’re hoping to do more with the best trips over time, so get in there and share yours!

Great photography

Not just visually pleasing photography, but photos that tell a story (good captioning and location data of course helps with this). Trips is all about enabling others to understand and be inspired by your travels.

Smart narrative

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a few smart words can elevate an image from stunning visual to personal anecdote. Well-written copy will help users really immerse themselves in your tale.

Real people

It goes without saying that Lonely Planet is all about real experiences, real people and real places. Trips is also about surfacing these authentic experiences, so promotional content (including in the bio) won’t get surfaced. Ensure that your profile gives the user detail on who you are — all of this info and your profile picture will give much more personality to your trip.

Download the app now and let us know what you think of Trips — you can do this straight in the app.

This is the first version (with Android coming soon) so while we’re talking about delivering many more features to the next version, your feedback will help to evolve the app according to our community’s preferences — after all, that’s what this is all about!

Finally, *hat tip* to our friends at Unsplash, whose talented community have helped us ensure there is top quality and inspiring photography for Trips users from launch 👊

Want more on mobile? Discover our other app, Guides by Lonely Planet, now with over 150+ city guides including offline maps and expert tips.

Lonely Planet

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A glimpse into the digital products and creative ideas that power Lonely Planet. And perhaps the odd travel tale.

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