Planning a holiday with friends without the plan falling apart

Planning a trip for five people is not five times the job of planning a trip alone. It is a different job. Alone, a note is enough, because everything that has been decided sits in one head anyway. With five, it sits in five heads, and no two of them hold the same thing.

The point where it tips over is always the same one: somebody asks "so is the hotel booked or not?", and it takes twenty minutes before anyone can answer. Not because nobody knows, but because the answer sits somewhere between a voice message, a screenshot and a link from three weeks ago.

Why group chats are no good for planning a trip

A chat is an excellent tool. Just not for this job, for three reasons that all share the same root.

A chat is chronological, a trip is not. The message with the hotel suggestion sits where it was written: between a photo of the dog and the question of who is free on Saturday. To find it again, you have to know when it was written. Two weeks later, nobody does.

A chat has no notion of status. "Look at this house" and "I've booked the house" look identical in the thread: two messages. That one is a suggestion and the other a fact appears nowhere except in the wording, and wording cannot be skimmed.

A chat loses the author as soon as you scroll. Who suggested the viewpoint? At the moment of the message that is obvious. Three weeks later it is a question that has to be asked, and questions that have to be asked are exactly what makes planning drag.

The note in the glovebox, by the way, is not better. It is only more honest: it never pretended everyone could see it.

What a suggestion needs to hold up

The answer is not "a better tool", but a different shape for the same information. A suggestion that carries a group through a planning process needs three things a chat message does not have.

A place. Not "the house near Betancuria", but a point that lies on a map. That makes immediately answerable what is otherwise a debate: how far is this from everything else?

An author. You need to be able to see who brought something in. That sounds like a detail and is the most important line of all, because it cuts the follow-up question short ("Jonas, what was it with the boat trip again?") and because it shows that no single person is carrying the whole trip. Traveto does not store on the place itself who added it. Names appear on comments and ratings. So whoever suggests something adds a short comment saying why.

A status. And one you can see without reading.

The four statuses that actually occur

In practice, four are enough. More states sound like more precision and lead to nobody maintaining them. Traveto does not prescribe any statuses. You create them as your own categories, each with a colour or a symbol, and then see them on the map.

Idea. Somebody suggested something. Nothing more. The normal case at the start, and it is perfectly fine if half of it stays an idea.

Booked. It is binding, it costs money, it stands. From here on you plan around it, not about it.

Check. The most interesting status. Something speaks against it, but it is not settled: the ferry only sails on Tuesdays. The restaurant closes in March. The holiday house takes no dogs. A chat has no place for this. There, such a thing is said once and sinks. As a visible status, somebody asks now instead of finding out on the road.

Gap. The status that gets lost most easily: something belongs here, and nobody has entered anything yet. The transfer from the airport. The night between two legs. A gap is not an error message, it is a promise to the group: we have not forgotten this, this is open. A category cannot do this, because the place does not exist yet. Write the gap into the note of the place before it, and everyone sees it.

The difference between Check and Gap is the difference between "we know about a problem" and "we know about an empty space". Both are valuable, and both disappear in a chat thread.

Settle the roles early

As soon as more than three people are involved, the question comes up, and it usually comes up at the wrong moment: when somebody has deleted something.

Traveto has two roles:

• Owner: created the portal, invites, removes, and can make the portal a public map.
• Member: adds places, changes them, comments and rates. That is everyone else.

There is no read-only role. For the mother-in-law who is coming along but would rather not plan, a link to the trip is enough. You share it from the trip summary, and she needs no account for it.

Whoever should plan along becomes a member. Otherwise one person ends up planning the whole trip again and the others send her suggestions by chat.

A map is not decoration

The moment a shared plan really gets easier is the one where somebody sees the list as a map for the first time. What was fifteen lines before is then a shape: three places sit close together, one is surprisingly far away, and between two of them there is a mountain.

Debates that were had as opinion ("that's not far") are settled before they start. And they are settled for everybody at once, which is the real gain.

One limitation belongs here: Traveto calculates driving time and distance between the stops of a trip for a car. With a caravan behind the car the same road takes considerably longer, and on motorcycles in a group it usually does too. You add that surcharge yourself. How is covered in the articles on the motorcycle tour and the caravan holiday.

An order of steps that works

If you are just starting out, this sequence helps. It is deliberately built so that the group is involved early and does not merely get to nod at the end.

1. Settle the dates and the group. Only that. Not the destination, because the destination is a decision, and decisions need suggestions that do not exist yet.
2. Invite everyone, straight away. Before anything is settled. Someone who joins once half of it is booked brings objections, not suggestions.
3. Let people collect without sorting. For two weeks, everything may go in. Rejecting an idea early costs more than letting one stand too long.
4. Only then look at the map. Now it shows what fits together and what does not, based on geography rather than volume.
5. Book the binding things first. Accommodation and travel. Everything else plans itself around them.
6. Name the gaps, do not fill them. What is open stays visibly open. That is the difference between a plan and a hope.

The real gain

None of this is about tidiness. Tidiness is a by-product.

It is about the fact that a trip one person organised feels different to the others than one everybody planned together, even when the same hotels end up booked. A plan in which everyone recognises something they brought in themselves is the group's plan. Anything else is an offer you agree to.

That is why every suggestion deserves a comment from the person who brought it in.