Sync your Planapple trips with Google Calendar and iCal

While it would be nice to do nothing but travel and plan trips with Planapple full time, most of us have busy lives filled with work, family, and social appointments. There are lots of great, free, calendar programs out there to help us keep track of these crazy schedules such as Google Calendar and Apple iCal. Wouldn't it be great if all of your Planapple trip plans automatically appeared in your main calendar program so you could keep track of them there along with everything else?

Sync Itinerary With Calendar

As of today, Planapple's new "Sync Itinerary" feature makes this easy. Once you've added start and end dates to your trip, click on the "Sync itinerary with Google Calendar or iCal" link under the calendar widget on the right side of the main trip page.

This will bring up a dialog with a special link that you can copy and paste into most calendar programs. This will let them import all of your scheduled Planapple trips and itineraries as a shared calendar. (For those who are curious, the link is called an iCal Feed which is like an RSS or news feed for your calendar).

Planning a Trip with Pinterest and Planapple

My wife and I enjoy using Planapple to plan trips, and have been using it for a couple of years to plan everything from weekend 'get-aways' to multi-stop adventures. It's a simple tool that lets us collect cool ideas from around the web, talk about them, make plans, and take them with us on the road.

Pinterest + Planapple = Pretty Fun

Recently we discovered Pinterest and were struck not only by the breadth of beautiful imagery shared there, but also the variety of cool 'bucket lists' users were creating to catalog the interesting places they want to visit. Browsing through these boards, we thought Pinterest + Planapple would be a great combo to get ideas and inspiration for our next adventure.

Country road in Sonoma County

With the newest addition to our family having recently arrived, we decided to take baby steps for our next trip and visit the relatively close & familiar destination of Sonoma Wine Country in a few months time.

We've been to Sonoma many times before and love it, but are looking forward to getting a different perspective using Pinterest as a starting point for ideas.

This article will walk you though how we planned our trip using Pinterest and Planapple. Turns out, it actually worked pretty well. Find out more after the jump.

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.

Planapple goes mobile for iPhone, Android and BB6

That's right, we're thrilled to finally take the cover off of our new Planapple mobile app, which will let you take all of your plans and research with you on the road. The app runs in a standard web-browser (using HTML5 - if you're into that sort of thing) but lets access all of your information offline or in 'airplane-mode' if you don't want incur any roaming charges when traveling overseas. No app-store download, installation or purchase is required.

Get your trip on your phone

Here's how it works:

1. On your phone, go to www.planapple.com/m/ (notice the extra "/m/" on the end). 
2. After Planapple finishes loading, tap "Sign In" and then log into Planapple as usual.
3. In a moment, your current trip information will appear. (Tap "My Trips" at the bottom to choose from your other trips.)

Currently the app will run well on iPhones (use Safari to be able to create a homescreen shortcut), Android phones and V6 BlackBerries.

Use Planapple with Facebook, Twitter, and Google

This week we turned on integration with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. There are two immediate benefits:

1. If you're using our new "public favorites" feature that Pete wrote about recently, you'll find Facebook Like and Send buttons on your public favorites pages. You can use the Send button to easily send your favorite travel ideas to your friends on Facebook, and of course they can Like what they see. Plus, we've hooked up Facebook comments for discussing your favorite places with your friends.

2. When you invite family and friends to help you plan a trip, they can use their existing Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts (Gmail or Google Apps) to start using Planapple instantly -- without having to register for a new Planapple account or verify their email addresses.

We added these same three buttons to our sign-in page, too. If you'd like to convert your Planapple account so that you can sign into it using Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google, just go to the Planapple Linked Accounts settings and follow the instructions there.

We'll be adding additional Twitter, Google, and Facebook features in the future. Let us know how you'd like to connect Planapple with other services you use -- just click the Feedback link on the right.