I’ve been waiting for this blog post for more than a year now.
This is my startup, Plnnr.com. If you want, go there first, form an opinion, and then get back here, I’ll wait :)
As you can tell, plnnr.com is an automatic trip planner – it saves you a lot of the trouble and hard work of planning a trip, and leaves you to decide just on the interesting things – what you plan to do on your trip.
I’ve been working on this with my partner, a product manager, for about 15 months now. We opened up the website for public access on July 18. Since then we showed it to people to get feedback but we didn’t publicize it.
Now, we’re starting to publicize it “for real”, with the goal of getting people to really use it.
We’ve been working on this project with no funding all this time, as our part time job, and as a result – there’s still a lot of work to be done. We have a lot of amazing features planned, and we have a great vision ahead of us, and we hope that we can achieve it.
This is the point where you come in – tell us what you think – here, or on our blog, and soon on the feedback system. We need your help!
Of course, if you find it in your heart to tell your friends who are planning a trip about our website, please do :)
There’s a lot more to be said about this project, and I intend to say it in future blog posts, so stay tuned!
Hey Dude,
First I want to congratulate you for reaching this stage in the project, that is really great.
Second, the site looks great! I love the GUI and the front page (though it looks a bit off on my FF 3.5 for some reason..). Did you design yourself or did you hire someone?
Third, I have to say, from my own point of view, the idea is cool, but:
a) You need to expand the hotel choosing options (sometimes you get a “deal” and are “stuck” with a certain hotel, which might not be in your list.
b) I would add “anchors” so that if I know I want to see a flamenco show that I heard is good so it can be added to the route.
c) I don’t know how you decide which places are at most interesting but perhaps in your ripping algorithm you can add keywords so that someone who’s interested in sports will get a route visiting BarcelonaFC’s stadium..
d) Perhaps adding alternatives. I’ll try to explain myself better: Personally, when I plan a trip, I ENJOY viewing alternatives and choosing where to go, even leaving some optional places if I don’t like my original route. I know a lot of people (my dad, for instance) enjoy planning and reading about the places they’ll be visiting almost as much as they enjoy at the trip eventually. The idea of automatic time-saving trip planning is great, but do you really think it would replace a more thorough trip planning? I don’t…
But again- really looks good and professional. Maybe enhance a bit ’bout the back-end? :)
later,
Ofir
Ofir:
First, Thanks! I really appreciate your comments!
As to your suggestions:
a. hotels: will do, I’m working on it now :)
b. anchors: you can do that already, although adding POI’s of your own (“custom POIs”) is currently not well supported, I will make it work better.
c. Will do. After a big revamping, the tag system will do that
d. I plan on adding alternatives, and there are even more features down the road that will answer this issue. Regarding where trip planning will go… Honestly, I don’t know, but I believe there is a market for this idea, and some people would like to just ‘let go’.
Re- enhancements – will do, working on it now.
Thanks again!
Cool site!
1) Wonder if you will expand the destination to cover Japan as well?
2) When trying to read the blog section, I got error “Error establishing a database connection” instead
Keep up the good work
Anthony:
1. We are working on adding more destinations now, although we’ll probably add more destinations from Europe first. I’ll try to push Japan up though :)
2. Thanks, will fix that asap
Thanks!
Anthony:
The blog is fixed, thanks again for the heads up.
Wow, congratulations on opening the site to the public!
It looks awesome, gotta love simplistic and useful design. Good luck with it.
Good luck to you guys, amazing work so far.
Hey Imri
Way to go man, mazal tov!
I just entered the site from work with IE6 (not my comp) and you did a bold move with not letting in the site but suggesting me to download a new browser!
Dling…
It’s a shame you don’t have London cause I am flying there tomorrow. :)
It’s hard to really test the site, not talking about playing it, without a use case. Anyway, I think you should hilight the roads or places when you vote (no-way, maybe, etc), so it’s clearer where they are positioned.
Also for taxis, it’s important to know how much you should pay, cause they usually fool tourists.
It seems calculating get stuck for some reason after playing with the daily plan. hmmm.
Bottom line, it looks really impressive and professional.
Wishing you all the best!
Mazal Tov!!!!
very cool!