Travelchime is like Google Docs for planning vacation travel with your friends' recommendations. It lets you add places and attractions you're looking to visit to a doc, export them to Google Maps, and collaborate with your friends who've been there or are going there with you.
We used to plan our trips using Google Docs and Sheets, but it was a pain. We'd write the documents, then had to add the same places to a map for when we're on the trip. We also often sent these out to friends who asked -- there's nobody whose recommendations you trust more than your friends -- but it's hard to find which friends have these docs.
We built Travelchime to solve this. With Travelchime, you can:
1. Add all the museums, restaurants, and places you're staying/want to visit to a doc on Travelchime, and see them on a map with their opening times, links to Yelp, and more
2. Share the doc with friends on the trip or ask others for recommendations: multiple people can edit/suggest at the same time, just like Google Docs [1]
3. Export the places to Google Maps for when you're on the go
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
5. Once you’ve gone on the trip, you can share the full itinerary with notes to inspire your friends
We haven’t monetized, but will eventually link out to hotels that work well with your itinerary and get affiliate commissions there.
We'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 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261), and past HN launches (e.g., for WrapAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423070) got us our first paying customers. We love the direct feedback we get, so if you're planning a trip soon, give it a shot and let us know what you think either here or by email at [email protected]!
[1] To enable real-time editing, we use Quill (https://quilljs.com/) and ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb), both amazing projects. We had also tried Draft.js, Slate, so if you want to chat text editing hit us up!
[2] A combination of Google's Entity Recognition API, Google Maps' APIs, and human checkers
[3] For those curious: we <3 React and have an all-Javascript stack with Node.js and MySQL on the back-end
by Andrey
Azimov