Trip planning apps, and the pin problem
The apps are good. They collect links, drop pins on a map, sort a day, share with whoever else is coming and work on a plane. What none of them does is decide anything, and a trip is mostly decisions.
What they are for, and they do it well
A planning app is a container. Paste a link from an article and it lifts out the place. Save something from a map and it lands in the same list. Drag things into days, add the flight, share it with the other parent, take it offline. That is a real job and doing it in a notes app and a spreadsheet is worse.
Most are free, several sell a paid tier, and price is not the interesting part. What you are buying at any price is the container, not the contents.
The pin problem
Two weeks of saving produces forty places, and forty places is not a plan. It is a list that has quietly moved every hard question to the week you leave, when you will sit down and discover that eleven of them are near each other, four are shut on the day you are free, two want tickets bought in advance, and one is a fifty minute drive that looked like twenty on the map.
This is the thing families describe most often when they talk about planning going wrong. Not a shortage of options. Forty options and no basis for cutting them.
Some apps will now generate an itinerary from your list, which arranges the pins geographically and by opening hours where it has them. That helps with the ordering. It does not tell you which of the forty deserved to be in the list, and it inherits whatever the underlying listing says about hours, which is the exact fact most likely to be stale.
Three things a container cannot do
- Cut the list. Somebody has to decide that two of your four things are the same idea done twice and one of them goes. An app has no view on that, and the person building the list is the least able to hold it, because everything in there is there for a reason.
- Check your dates. Hours in an app come from a map listing or from the place's own page at some point in the past. Neither is somebody opening the venue's own site and reading the calendar for the Tuesday you are going.
- Route from your front door. A map distance starts at a point on a map. It does not know that your accommodation is up a hill, that the car park is a nine minute walk from the entrance, or that the road is different at half past eight.
The honest comparison
| A planning app | A researched guide | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, or a small annual fee | $99 to $299, once |
| Collecting places | Excellent | Done for you |
| Cutting the list | You do it | Done before you see it |
| Opening days | Whatever the listing says | Checked per place, per date |
| Travel times | Map estimate | Timed from your door, car park included |
| Built around your children | You do that | From a questionnaire about them |
| Works with no signal | Usually yes | Yes |
| Changing it on the day | You can edit anything | Fixed once delivered |
That last row is a real advantage for the app and it is worth stating plainly. If you want to move things around from a hotel room at ten at night, an app you control beats a document somebody built for you.
Use both, if you like
Plenty of families will keep the app and use it as the container. Nothing about a checked shortlist stops you dragging it into your own days. If you would rather do the whole thing yourself, the four checks is the method written out, and ten things worth checking is the version you can work through the week before you go.
If the forty pins are the problem
Guides are $99, $179 or $299 depending on how many places you are staying. See the three tiers.