How to design your perfect travel plan with Itini

Published in

Itini

6 min readAug 18, 2020

Creating a great travel plan is a very creative task. My mission (within the MVP limitations) is to define the feature set that will convince you, dear reader, that Itini is the most effective and friendly app to plan your next trip to Thailand (more countries will be added later). To understand the important ingredients I continuously collect feedback, offering the app to every traveler I meet down the road.

I see trip planning as a continuous process. The algorithm can provide a great plan to start from, but smart editing features are not less important.

How smart Itini is? Buckle up for a quick features walkthrough! There will be lots of pictures :)

How is Itini different?

Itini meets planning preferences most efficiently and innovatively possible. Most of the routine work is delegated to AI: the traveler says “what” while “how” is figured out by the system. Few examples:

When creating a trip, a traveler only defines what’s important in general: dates, speed of travel, types of attractions etc — the AI considers it all when creating an actual plan, actionable immediately. It only takes ~3 seconds.
When a traveler adds a destination or an attraction, the algorithm will always modify the entire route, ensuring the optimal order of visitation, working hours, and transportation convenience.
When a destination is added the daily plans will be populated automatically (as the system already knows the preferred traveling preferences).
When the number of days for an existing destination is reduced, the AI will do all it can to leave the attractions marked as favorite in place.

In the future versions, upon traveler’s permission, AI will learn the personal habits to continuously adjust the trip to his best satisfaction. We envision Itini as your truly magic companion and advisor.

So what’s in the box?

It wasn’t easy to define the minimal feature set, let’s review what we came up with, scenario by scenario:

Registration

It all starts with a greeting: the first screen offers to register (with email, Facebook, or Apple login) to sync your trips across devices. Also, when registering with Facebook we will know about you, the traveler, a bit more, so the generated trip will be tailored even better (that kind of personalization is on our roadmap at the time of writing). Either way, no worries — you can always postpone the registration after ensured that enough value is provided by our app.

Creating your first trip

One screen later, the colorful selectors are shown to let you specify the trip preferences: duration, speed of travel, the popularity of the selected places (do you want to blend with the crowds or go off the beaten path?), and specific domains of interest:

What if you like cigars, golf clubs or shochu bars? We’ll implement more specific domains of interest later, yet… meanwhile, just in a few seconds, you’ll receive a great plan to start from!

What’s in the trip plan?

Most of the “trip planner” apps actually don’t plan the things for you. They can help suggest places or pin them on the map (especially when it comes to places they can sell tickets to) but you will do the planning, messing with administrative hierarchy, working hours, geographic proximity, types of transport, traveling time between destinations, etc. etc.

Itini AI considers all that and more to come up with an actionable plan. Our plan is a ready-to-go route of the places to visit (mostly free attractions like parks, beaches, temples etc): something that will take time to do by yourself after reading through Lonely Planet, travel blogs, TripAdvisor, and asking friends. All that, done automatically in ~3 seconds and a few clicks.

The high-level trip view

The first screen shows the trip as a map of “places”. Each “place” (typically a province, city or island) offers its own authentic attractions and experience. For each place, the main activity types are highlighted:

Transportation

Transportation bars are clickable so when you change the transportation mode, the time calculation for the corresponding time calculations of the trip will be triggered automatically. No need to manually check the working hours of the attractions on the arrival day!

The daily view

When clicking on each place, a set of daily plans is revealed:

A map for each day is provided and the list of attractions along with the specific information such as description, working hours and a click to navigate to the attraction on Google map:

What if I want to change what I see?

No plan is a plan without a personal touch! We know that and we came prepared.

Liked a place and want to stay longer?

The number of days can be easily adjusted. When reducing the length of your stay, the algorithm will try to keep every attraction that was marked as “favorite”.

A particular place or attraction doesn’t look promising?

Remove it with a single swipe:

Don’t miss your flight back

The AI assumes that the start and the end of the trip are fixed, hence you’ll see the alert if the number of days doesn’t match the overall trip duration.

Wanna add a particular place or attraction to the plan?

Choose from the list of destinations, sorted by the likelihood according to your preferences. Choose the number of dates and since the system is aware of what you like, the days will be automatically populated with attractions you’ll most probably like! Also, the place will be inserted in your trip automatically, ensuring the transportation efficacy and reasonable order of visitation.

Want to add some attraction nearby?

The nearby attractions list with filters will be presented. The attraction will be added to keep the route and the time of visit optimal!

Let the AI know what you like the most!

By marking an attraction as a favorite, the system will try to keep it within the schedule even when the number of days for that destination will be reduced!

Conclusion

Tell Itini what’s important and get an instant plan in ~3 seconds, manually edit the plan with a few swipes — this his how easy trip planning should be!

Let us know how we can do better! We have lots of ideas, yet nothing is as valuable as feedback from the actual travelers. Be in touch — we’re all ear!

What’s next?

In the next post, I’ll explore what is done till now, let’s check together how many MVP rules were broken!