How to Plan a Trip With Planapple

A lot of new people have been visiting Planapple recently, and some have asked what the best way is to get started. Here's a simple guide to get you going and show you how Planapple makes planning a trip easier.

What is Planapple?

At its heart, Planapple is a research and planning tool for the web. It gives you a single place to save your research, talk about it with tripmates, and take it with you on your smart phone.

Planning a trip on Planapple often looks like this:

You:

• Surf the web to find interesting ideas on sites you like.
• Save those pages to your trip on Planapple with the bookmarking tool.
• Talk about stuff with tripmates back on Planapple via comments in the discussion section (ie "What do you think of these 3 hotels?").
• Organize things into lists, make decisions, and perhaps build an itinerary.
• Go on your trip and access the stuff you saved on Planapple from the mobile app.

Let's get started.

Yeah, but what does everyone else have to say?

So you're planning a last-minute weekend getaway, and you've both decided Saturday night should be a splurgy, super-special, won't-soon-be-forgotten kind of dinner. You've got it narrowed down to three possible restaurants you found on Yelp, and bookmarked all of them into your Planapple trip.

So how to decide? Wouldn't it be nice if you could check the reviews on other sites like TripAdvisor and Yahoo Local, look at a copy of each restaurant's menu, or check on OpenTable to see if there are even reservations still available? "Easy enough," you say, "I know how to use the web."

And you could do that. But at Planapple we hate having to repeatedly retype things like the name of each restaurant. And we hate getting to a site and finding out it doesn't actually have any information on the restaurant. So instead, we're going to make Planapple do the work for you.

We've added magic links on each item's details page. In the bookmarks section, we'll show you all the links we could find for that place at other web sites, automatically...

... some you know, and some you may not have heard of before. But all there, ready for the clicking, without any extra effort on your part. Ta-da!

Find more travel ideas, more easily

If you're using our bookmarking tool, you know how Planapple makes it easy to keep track of all the travel ideas you find around the web. But did you know Planapple can help you explore the web for new ideas, too?

At the top of every category page (like Lodging or Dining), you'll find suggested searches:

Many of these are sites our users have found helpful for planning their own trips. You can either type in your own search term in the box (e.g., "beachfront condo") or just click one of the links below it.

And Planapple doesn't just link to these sites, it actually fills in their search forms for you with your destination and travel dates whenever possible. So if you're looking for (say) hotels or airline tickets, you don't have to keep re-typing your trip details at all those other sites.